June Review
Despite two breaches in my system, June was a good month. I was up about 40R:
The 29th trade and the 59th trade represent whole days where I overtraded and did not follow my system. I do not include each separate trade in my journal for these days (because there are so many trades and I’m not following my system) so I include them as one trade and I compute the R value based on my average R for the month. So that is why I say I was up “about” 40R, because there is estimation involved with these two days.
Despite all the R, my account was only up 18%. I know I know, 18% is pretty good. But I had planned on my average R being 1.2% of my total equity. It turns out it was only 0.6%. And I have to figure out why that happened and what I can do to change it. If I had used 1.2%, I’d be up 36% instead. An example is trade 86, which was my biggest risk-to-reward trade for the month but also my lowest R value.
Some of the reasons I used less of an R were: 1) I thought the market direction was questionable and so I wanted to lessen my risk, 2) I didn’t have confidence in shorting and so I lessened my risk, 3) my math is bad and I figured the wrong position sizes, 4) I overestimated slippage and underestimated liquidity, and 5) some bars were so narrow that I was afraid to buy so many shares.
My first reaction to all of this was that I will increase my R and this will hopefully increase my average R. But I think instead that I will put more effort into buying enough so that I am risking what I want to. My goal for July is to bring my average R up to 1%.
I attribute a lot of my success this month to meditating for 30 minutes every morning before the market opens. My worst day was a day that I overslept and didn’t have time to meditate. It has also helped me in other ways besides trading. I feel more content and have less of a temper. I also attribute the success of this month to the fact that I was using 30-minute candles, which did not allow me much opportunity to overtrade. Also, I put a lot of effort into looking for very narrow bars.
I am on vacation until the 10th. The new all-time highs/lows will continue to post as usual.
