Before we get to March’s numbers, here is a short reminder of the results from February. The full report from February can be found here and you can get the last several months in a row vertically by clicking here and scrolling down.
Tradesight Pip Results for February 2012
Number of trades: 30
Number of losers: 13
Winning percentage: 56.7%
Worst losing streak: 3 in a row (start of the month)
Net pips: +70
Reminder: Here are the rules.
1) Calls made in the calendar month count. In other words, a call made on August 31 that triggered the morning of September 1 is not part of September. Calls made on Thursday, September 30 that triggered between then and the morning of October 1 ARE part of September.
2) Trades that triggered before 8 pm EST / 5 pm PST (i.e. pre Asia) and NEVER gave you a chance to re-enter are NOT counted. Everything else is counted equally.
3) All trades are broken into two pieces, with the assumption that one half is sold at the first target and one half is sold at the final exit. These are then averaged. So if we made 40 pips on one half and 60 on the second, that’s a 50-pip winner. If we made 40 pips on one half, never adjusted our stop, and the second half stopped for the 25 pip loser, then that’s a 7 pip winner (15 divided by 2 is 7.5, and I rounded down).
4) Pure losers (trades that just stop out) are considered 25 pip losers. In some cases, this can be a few more or a few less, but it should average right in there, so instead of making it complicated, I count them as 25 pips.
5) Trade re-entries are valid if a trade stops except between 3 am EST and 9 am EST (when I’m sleeping). So in other words, even if you are awake in those hours and you could have re-entered, I’m only counting things that I would have done. This is important because otherwise the implication is that you need to be awake 24/6. Triggers that occur right on the Big Three news announcements each month don’t count as you shouldn’t have orders in that close at that time.
You can go through the reports and compare the breakdown that I give as each trade is reviewed.
Tradesight Pip Results for March 2012
Number of trades: 33
Number of losers: 17
Winning percentage: 48.5%
Worst losing streak: 3 in a row (around the 6th)
Net pips: +100
The Forex markets continue to exhibit narrower than preferred ranges, which makes for poor trading opportunities. We only had one trade the whole month, I believe, where the final exit was more than 100 pips in the money. However, with good trade management, we still ended up ahead, and actually outperformed February despite lower win ratio. The good news is that it didn’t come down to any one big trade, where if you missed it, it ruined your month. The bad news is that these narrow ranges, which I will discuss in a separate blog over the weekend, continue to disappoint Forex traders (fortunately, futures and stocks have had great weeks).
What is really remarkable here is that the six month AVERAGE daily ranges dropped quite a bit further in March than where they were in February. The EURUSD dropped it’s average 13 pips to 141 pips per day over the last six months. That’s a big drop when thinking about an average. Really happy that we survived the way that we did. GBPUSD dropped about 7 pips off its trailing six month average too. The only thing steady is the USDJPY, which sadly only trades about 57 pips per day on average since the earthquake last year. The AUDUSD and NZDUSD also dropped about 10 pips on average during the month.
