July Month in Review

Despite numerous mistakes, July ended up being my best trading month so far. I still have improvement to make, but I'm getting better.

Here's my stats for the month:

Starting account value: $4856.64
Ending account value: $6098.42
Total gain: $1241.78
Total gain (%): 25.6%

Average daily return: 1.79%
Average daily P/L: $59.13
Annualized return: 652.3%
Sharpe Ratio: 2.50
Sortino Ratio: .0016
Maximum drawdown: -22.06%
Total commissions paid: $933.90

Total # of trades: 23
Total # of winning trades: 10
Total # of losing trades: 13
% winning trades: 43.5%
Average # trades per day: 1.1
Largest # consecutive winners: 4
Largest # consecutive losers: 6

Positions held long: 18
Positions held short: 5

Largest winning trade: $1172.40
Largest winning trade (%): 57.12%
Largest losing trade: -$500
Largest losing trade (%): -20.59%

Average overall trade: $52.15
Average overall trade (%): 3.16%
Average winning trade: $309.66
Average winning trade (%): 15.6%
Average losing trade: $-145.94
Average losing trade (%): -6.44%

Total # trading days: 21
# green days on account: 7
# red days on account: 14

Here's a graph of my account over the month:



Here's a graph of my account from when I first started trading at the end of April. I actually started trading with less cash (around $2500) and added money later on at the beginning of June. This graph operates under the assumption I started with all the cash I eventually added. You can see that April and May were rough months for me as I was learning. June was better where I was pretty much flat, and finally, this past month, I made back the majority of what I lost.




Here's a list of all my trades for the month. The ones with asterisks indicate trades that I felt were "bad trades"....either trades I shouldn't have entered, or trades that I screwed up my entry or exit badly. You can see I started off the month badly, but these "bad trades" got less frequent as the month went on, indicating improvement in my trade selection and execution. You can see one of my "bad trades" was actually a winning trade...it was where I screwed up my exit on UVSE and ended up with only a $180 profit rather than over a $1000 profit.



You can see I paid a lot in commissions this month. That's mainly due to playing the ultra-low priced OTCBB stocks where I end up paying $20 - $50 commissions for very large orders.


If you compare my stats to last month's stats, you'll see I've improved significantly. However, there are other areas I could still improve upon.

Where I've improved:

1. Last month my average winning % per trade was too low. I had a goal of increasing my winning % per trade, which I succeeded in doing. This month I significantly improved it to almost 16% per trade
2. Last month I had the goal of reducing my number of trades. I succeeded and cut my # of trades by almost half.
3. I improved in both the Sharpe and Sortino ratio. In fact, my Sortino ratio is now positive rather than negative like last month.
4. My average overall trade was positive rather than negative like last month.
5. My average winning trade in $ was much, much higher than last month.
6. My % return for the month was much better than last month
7. My largest # of consecutive winners was double that of last month

Where I can get better:

1. While my % of winning trades improved, it's still under 50%. It needs to be at least 60-70%. Seven of my losing trades were "bad trades" that I could've avoided. If I hadn't made those bad trades, I would've been in that 60-70% range.
2. In relation to #1, I need to reduce my bad trades. I got better as the month went on. Those bad trades cost me up to $2000. If it weren't for those trades, I could've finished the month up 50% or more.
3. In relation to #1, six losing trades in a row is too many. Three of those were poor trades, so that # could've been reduced to 3.
4. I had too many red days on my account. This is again due to too many mistakes.
5. While my average losing trade went down in both % and $, it's still too high. Ideally, it should be under $100 and under 5%. Again, this was mainly caused by some of my poor trade decisions earlier in the month.
6. Maximum drawdown was much higher than last month, and this again was due to some poor trade decisions earlier in the month.
7. Most of my gains came from UVSE. While that's not necessarily a bad thing (it was a solid trade based on a number of factors), I need to have more consistency in my winners. UVSE helped buffer me against some big mistakes this past month. By eliminating big mistakes, and improving my exits from my trades, I'm confident this will improve.
   

Overall, things are looking better and better, and I'm looking to have August be an even better month than July was.

As always, I have to thank Timmay and Mike_13th for their help in my progress.