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Trading Plan: Monday 18 November
Welcome to this week’s Trading Plan.
I’m Ahmad, a non-professional trader from Malaysia who’s participating in the darwinex Zero platform.
I’m trying to achieve consistency as a profitable trader and am documenting the journey in these posts. In a way, this is my public trading journal.
Trading is a very personal pursuit in that it is most difficult to do well successively over an extended period and that no two traders can apply the same techniques or strategy to end up with the same results. Emotion control is a significant factor that decides how well you do in the markets and all good traders settle with a strategy that is most fitting to their psychology.
I ended the 11th Nov week at position 3224/7191. Previous week was 4120/7119.
More about me:
Trader’s self-review
What is this Trader’s self-review?
In this section, I recap the previous trading week, how it all went and discuss anything interesting in terms of learning from both gains and mistakes.
I end this section talking about what I’m going to do to improve myself as a trader.
1) What went well?
Significantly reduced overall lot size, aiming to achieve lower VaR and bump up my DARWIN risk ratio.
Closed the 6 lots in USD/JPY, each with 1.5+ % gains. Exited the SMH short by end of the week.
Despite these attempts, end-of-week VaR was higher than previous week. I am now thinking that there are subtleties to the risk ratio calculation I’m not aware of. Anyhow, I’ve developed stronger focus in terms of viewing my MT5 signal account as nothing more (read: nothing more) than providing signals to the Darwinex platform. It is most definitely not a trading account.
It’s all about accuracy, quality of entries and exits. A mindset achievement.
2) What went wrong?
Emotion control issue: Well, I gotta admit the USD/JPY exits were a mix of wanting to lock in the one-plus percent gains and drastically reducing my overall lot size. It kept going higher as Trump-trade sentiment stayed strong up until Thursday.
What I should have done is re-enter with new working lot sizes as soon as my analysis proved the uptrend is still intact, regardless of the price level, which it did. I sort of wanted to keep myself attached to the blanket of safety of not losing the gains I just made. Emotion control issue. I didn’t keep to my strategy as best as I should have.
Trade positioning issue: GBP/JPY presented a case of giving me additional, unnecessary drawdowns this week. Entered these trades with confidence of eventual Yen weakness only to be negated by weak UK economic data. Naturally, as per strategy, I added to positions but will admit the entry points could be improved by entering not by length of discount but by the occurrence or validation of the next structure shift. This way, I could have added to positions with far superior entry points and prevent unnecessary drawdowns.
3) Improvement action plans?
Trade my plan. And wait for structure shift validation before adding to existing positions. Can’t wait for the coming week.
Trader statistics
1-week trading performance
| This week | Previous week | Week of 28 Oct | |
| Trades | 41 | 16 | 21 |
| Win rate | 46.34 % | 56.25 % | 85.71 % |
| Profit factor | 3.05 | 2.87 | 2.69 |
| Payoff ratio | 3.53 | 1.92 | 0.45 |
| VaR | 16.57 % | 15.11 % | 16.57 % |
| Average winning trade | 0.06 % | 0.20 % | 0.20 % |
| Average losing trade | -0.02 % | -0.11 % | -0.45 % |
| Return | 0.79 % | 1.83 % | 2.34 % |
| Max. drawdown | -0.46 % | -1.33 % | -2.45 % |
| Daily STDV | 0.32 % | 1.29 % | 0.58 % |
| Link to post | Trading plan | Trading plan |
All-time trading performance
| This week | Previous week | Week of 28 Oct | |
| Return | -0.14 % | -0.48 % | -1.46 % |
| Max. drawdown | -10.40 % | -10.40 % | -10.40 % |
| Daily STDV | 1.13 % | 1.16 % | 1.14 % |
| Annualised vol. | 17.35 % | 18.31 % | 17.66 % |
| Sharpe ratio | -0.05 | -0.18 | -0.64 |
| Sortino ratio | -0.08 | -0.31 | -1.00 |
| Skewness | 0.73 | 0.72 | 0.53 |
| Kurtosis | 2.37 | 1.87 | 2.21 |
