I have decided to keep track on my trades as I remembered what Brian Tracy said, “what gets measured, gets improved”. Thus, to show my commitment to improving my trades, I am going to show my trading results at the end of every month from now on. I hope I will become aware of my mistakes by sharing them and equally important is to have the guts to admit them.
Summary of trades
For Apr 09, I was long on Chinese companies listed in Hong Kong Stock Exchange. An early shoot of recovery and the start of a small uptrend triggers buy signals for quite a number of counters. Since the economic downturn, the current trading volume has increased tremendously, which created the momentum for price increase. The reason I switched from SGX to HKSE is due to the latter’s larger trading volume and price volatility. Although the volume was healthy, the risk-level indication was high which means a retracement can come any time soon. Nonetheless, I placed a few trades and got the contracts when they broke their price resistence. All of them hit my stop loss limit and I remembered telling my friends about “it’s alright to lose” some time ago. Now it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. Indeed, I find it ok to lose but I do feel some dejection. And a good trader must not blame the swine influenza for the retracement :)
What I have learned subsequently was that some of the other traders were using profit protecting technique due to the high risk line of the stocks. There were indeed times where I could set a profit protection of 70% but I decided to remain at the stop loss price to allow more fluctuations. My major mistake was not setting the correct position size for my trades. I overtraded as I went against the rule of only apportioning 33% of my capital on any one trade. I was 50% on one trade! Actually I only discovered after I revisited my textbook and found out about it. It just goes to show how important it is to revised the text regularly for a non-master trader. I could have reduced my losses quite significantly if I have sized my position properly.
| Counter |
Date In
|
Date Out
|
Action
|
No. of Shares
|
Price In
|
Price Out
|
Profit/Loss
|
| China Resources Logic |
7/4/2009
|
8/4/2009
|
Long
|
2,000.00
|
HK$4.45
|
HK$4.00
|
-S$180
|
| Harbin Power |
16/4/2009
|
27/4/2009
|
Long
|
3,000.00
|
HK$6.44
|
HK$6.04
|
-S$240
|
| Shenzhen International |
16/4/2009
|
22/4/2009
|
Long
|
50,000.00
|
HK$0.41
|
HK$0.38
|
-S$300
|
| Zhaojin Mining |
24/4/2009
|
28/4/2009
|
Long
|
2,000.00
|
HK$10.55
|
HK$9.80
|
-S$300
|
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Hey Alvin,
I feel your loss, but what you are doing is correct. You have to stick to your Trading Plan. Period.
If not, as you may or may not discover, in your journey towards financial independence, “Discretionary Trading” will hurt your pocket even more.
James
http://futures-trading.blogspot.com
Thanks James! I’ll definitely stick to it!