{"id":8949,"date":"2010-12-20T21:37:09","date_gmt":"2010-12-21T02:37:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.smbtraining.com\/blog\/?p=8949"},"modified":"2010-12-20T21:37:09","modified_gmt":"2010-12-21T02:37:09","slug":"evaluating-your-trading-results-part-23","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.smbtraining.com\/blog\/evaluating-your-trading-results-part-23","title":{"rendered":"Evaluating your trading results (part 2\/3)"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is a followup to yesterday’s post which can be found here<\/a>.\u00a0 In the first post in this series, we discussed the need to have a good set of records and to standardize those records.\u00a0 Today’s post is aimed at the active daytrader, and takes a look at some of the record keeping issues those of us who do 100 or more trades a day must face.\u00a0 If this is not you, then hold on for a few days because the third part of this series will actually dig into crunching your numbers in more detail, and that is where it gets interesting.\u00a0 But first, let’s dig a little bit more into the practical aspects of keeping these records.<\/p>\n

First of all, one of the comments on the first post asked how much time I devoted to record keeping each day.\u00a0 This is a good question that deserves some thought.\u00a0 The most important thing is that you have a consistent set of records, and that it is within your ability to keep these records religiously.\u00a0 For instance, I am a fairly active intraday trader, trading sometimes more than 20 names during a single trading day.\u00a0 On a very active day I will do 50 trades; I rarely do less than 10.\u00a0 I suppose it would be nice if I had a trade log for every trade that recorded what I was feeling and thinking, what people around me were doing, what the temperature in the room was, how much email I had answered to that point in the day, what related stocks were doing, what the sector was doing, what the market was doing, what related commodities and currencies were doing… you see the list of things that it might be nice to record is basically endless, but I know there is no way <\/em><\/strong>I am going to keep those kinds of records.\u00a0 I may do it for one trade, but whatever I decide to do I have to do for every trade.<\/p>\n

So you can see there are two conflicting concerns here — one one hand, you want your records to be as complete as possible.\u00a0 On the other hand, don’t set unrealistic goals with respect to what you are going to do.\u00a0 The answer will be different for everyone, but I record the following for every trade when I take it:<\/p>\n