YATD - Yet Another Trading Diary

[20.sum1]

So here's my trading diary.
I will have to do a bit of thinking on what exactly to record here so till then:thumb:

 

[20.sum1]

ok the plan is to first paper trade and if money is made then continue with real trades.
Trade will only be in nifty futures or options.
Strategy to be used is a half-tested strategy(still to figure many things out) and hence paper trading first.
I expect trades to be of 10 min duration to 1-2 days trade depending on the move caught.It is not possible for me to trade everyday so I expect trades to be infrequent.However I will atleast try to update @end of day as "no-trade" day or some relevant details.

 

[20.sum1]

no trades today for varied reasons..
in hindsight i wonder if my strategy would have signaled a trade for the spike starting @3 today.there were definitely a few short trades before ...not all of them successful..may be because larger trend is up.
too much thinking on this may be of limited use so ending hindsight speculations here.

Monday I will try to wake up on time and make a trade..for that, Sunday I will have to sleep on time.

 

[kingnemo]

no trades today for varied reasons..
in hindsight i wonder if my strategy would have signaled a trade for the spike starting @3 today.there were definitely a few short trades before ...not all of them successful..may be because larger trend is up.
too much thinking on this may be of limited use so ending hindsight speculations here.

Monday I will try to wake up on time and make a trade..for that, Sunday I will have to sleep on time.

"Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise"

 

[20.sum1]

After a long time this diary has been remembered..

Updates for last week

The good news is that I have started paper trading..and the bad news is that I am not trading Nifty futures right now because of office timing clashes..Actually going to office on time is not an issue but I will get more serious about that after I have some ray of hope here with this strategy.

Right now I am trading gold futures(in USD) in a demo account.

Here is the performance graph for the last week.

Detailed analysis will follow soon

 

[20.sum1]

out of 12 trades
2 trades generated by system that were not high probability. Why?I know the reason but I am waiting for a similar scenario to appear again to confirm where the system went wrong.
1 trade execution mistake.I was setting the stop but by mistake set it too close..immediately before i could change the stop, it was hit...so i re-entered the trade, anyways the new trade with correct stop was also hit.

1 trade according to signal which yielded a small profit.
2 more trades that were break even.in one of trades i gave away a huge amount of open profit because i did not get an exit signal..will have to check if there is a way to capture open profit in such scenarios.

rest of the trades were not generated by system but i took them just to test a few things or to get familiar with gci platform, or because i was impatient since no signal was being generated for a long time.

so overall 6 trades according to system with 1 open trade which is in slight profit.

also many more profitable signals were generated but i could not take them due to various reasons. :annoyed: ..will have to see what can be done about it.

Overall the trend in gold(in USD terms) and in nifty remains up.

 

[20.sum1]

M back

This week started good but ended badly.Many mistakes like chasing a price,revenge trading etc I had heard about were done and I can see them clearly now.

I realize that there are some main problems
1st that the system itself is not complete e.g. it still has to figure out the proper exit point(it tells but only approximately and I need more refinements to that), it still does not provide for a SL,all I do is put a large enough SL and hope that it does not get hit before I take my profits or losses.
Also it does not take into account the potential R:R ratio for a trade.

2nd is the problem as described..Lets say I view(according to system) that market is in uptrend..and will continue to be in uptrend for some more time to come..I open the terminal and see that prices have indeed gone up from where i saw them last time..now the dilemma..Should I enter right now or wait for a correction?Since the mkts are in uptrend it is quite safe to enter even now the only risk being some minor correction..if I wait for a correction,it may well not happen and I may miss out on a piece of action.I think the system must be able to tell me where to enter once a leg of a move has occurred..or whether to wait...the uncertainty is debilitating.

3rd is a very serious problem and it is related to not listening to the system itself. There have been profitable trades that the system told me to get out of but since i did not want to take measly profits from something I thought had more juice left, justifying that system itself is not fine-tuned.The result was being left with breakeven or loss making trades..leading to revenge trades.

4th is that I still have not been able to get a good grip on what time-frame should I be playing..rather I would say what profit should I be playing for....Longer time frames require a whole lot of patience,you may have to wait for a very long time to get a signal and you feel frustrated if a signal comes and you miss that in case you are bound with other commitments.
Shorter time frames on the other hand give you a feel for action,you know very soon the outcome whether profit or loss..however the costs of in and out are very high,mistakes can be more..in the end it can so happen that you have a small profit for hours of smaller-frame hard work when you can have easily put on a long term trade and just watched the profits grow.

5th after some winning trades I was more having more difficulty to put on a trade because i wanted the winning streak not to break..Will have to cautious about this thing from now on.

There may be many more things to say but for now it is enough.

Here is the equity graph...starting with 50000..at this rate it won't be too long to touch 0..its only a demo account thank heavens for that.

 

[20.sum1]

Last week started bad ,ended good but overall bad.

The problem started when the first trade which i had high hopes on went against my position. i tried being smart and added to it ..well the market kept on going opposite me..and i kept averaging...till the point when i had 8 times the initial position..at someplace it looked as if i had made the right call coz the loss started decreasing and i started hoping for a profit..but it was not to be the market started on its journey again and i had to close the entire position of 8 lots with loss...immediately after closing the position i was very so i decided to teach the market a lesson..i entered with 8 lots again and then again repeat and rinse...the funny thing is that my system had given a reverse signal by then but i ignored it.

the other two trades i took were good..1st one i entered a huge quantity (8 lots,last lot size used. ) by mistake but i was confident so did not close or reduce it..
2nd one.. when i entered the first leg of move was over ( i realized this later on after entering) and i knew that i would have to wait for a small correction or a sideways movement..i was pretty sure so i kept a huge SL of 20pts and went to sleep..when i woke up the market was pretty much the same place where i left it..by afternoon i was in profits which were captured by a target price order i had already set.

Here is the chart for this week

 

[20.sum1]

This week was a good week in the sense that week on week basis this was the first profitable week even though the profit was small.
The trades this week were less because I stopped after a trade that forced me to think about incorporating money mgmt in the plan.This trade went just as I had thought it should go although it caused me much stress because most of the time it was underwater...I had taken the entry at a high price, the prices came down to my optimal entry point where risk would have been minimal but I could not add to my already loss making position because in case my stops were hit my total loss would have been much more than what I had intended in the first place..Had I taken a small position above I would have been able to take another large position at a better price.The trade ended in a profit but profits could have been more.

Next week I will try to include my experiences from above case and will take trades accordingly.
I am also checking if I can include more than one commodity in my trades,may be currencies but that will be clear by next week.

Here is the chart for the week.

 

[yusi]

+1 for yet another YA.
+1 for a great nick.