I've been thinking and struggling over how to track my stats. It's been a long time since I've even tried to track anyting except daily account balance.
I feel like "all" pro traders know their stats. Do they? At least they know their win percentage...right? Their system expectancy?
My trouble is establishing what constitutes a trade. I don't trade with Rs. I don't trade with consistent postion size. I usually enter all in one, then scale out in multiple sells; is that one trade based on the entry or is each exit a trade? etc, etc, etc.
So really the question is, what do I seek to know? Definitely, annotating charts and this narrative blogging has been incredibly helpful to improving my trading. I would hope to look at my data to try to discern ways to improve.
For example, I used to take my first target at 10%, and I used to take off almost all of it, leaving just a small trailer. In between, I used to take off half at pl tgt, first at 12%, then 15%, and now at 20%. What if I could ascertain that I could be consistently holding out for 25% or more? What if I determined that I should be taking off more/less at 20%, to optimize gains. Maybe this is a job for backtesting, but I feel my style is more of an "art" and not all that easy to backtest.
Relevant stats for me might be:
number of trades with <0 gain
number of trades with 0-10% gain
number of trades with 10-20%, 20-30% and so on.
Which size gain is my sweet spot? Right now, I hope it would be the 20%ish trades, since that is my current "pay myself first" pl target zone.
Another point I'd like to investigate:
When a trade is a "total loss", how typically big is that loss?
In terms of overall win loss % performance, I could simply calculate my green vs red days, without trying to take a breakdown of trades, or trying to define/control what constitutes one trade.
Will continue to examine and strive to improve.
