Trading Plan: Monday 18 November

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 weekPrevious weekWeek of 28 Oct
Trades411621
Win rate46.34 %56.25 %85.71 %
Profit factor3.052.872.69
Payoff ratio3.531.920.45
VaR16.57 %15.11 %16.57 %
Average winning trade0.06 %0.20 %0.20 %
Average losing trade-0.02 %-0.11 %-0.45 %
Return0.79 %1.83 %2.34 %
Max. drawdown-0.46 %-1.33 %-2.45 %
Daily STDV0.32 %1.29 %0.58 %
Link to postTrading planTrading plan

All-time trading performance

This weekPrevious weekWeek of 28 Oct
Return-0.14 %-0.48 %-1.46 %
Max. drawdown-10.40 %-10.40 %-10.40 %
Daily STDV1.13 %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
Skewness0.730.720.53
Kurtosis2.371.872.21