Tradesight has been providing stock calls daily since 2002. We post the results of our of our trades, winners and losers, in our reports and Market Blog every day. Some people might find it surprising to learn that while we track our Futures and Forex formal trade call results monthly, we don’t post anything beyond the trade reviews on our Stocks calls.
There is actually a very specific reason for this. I’ve never been a fan of trying to “hype” or “promote” something. Being profitable in trading is about learning what to do and getting yourself to make the right decisions. In Futures as well as in Forex, if we publish a call in advance, just about everyone should get the same fills and be able to get in and out at almost the same numbers. That isn’t always the case in stocks. It depends on how many shares you are trading and what the liquidity in the market for that stock is at the time. For that reason, I have already been hesitant to say “These are the exact results.” I would never want to try to suggest that someone would make a certain amount of dollars trading a certain number of shares or make a certain percentage. If I take a trade and sell it for a $0.30 gain, it makes a big statistical difference if someone else had to pay $0.05 more to get in and maybe got out for $0.02 less. That’s $0.23 instead of $0.30 even though the concept of the trade was fine.
However, we have had enough people ask us to give some sort of statistically valid breakdown of our results, and we have final settled on what I believe is a fair and representative way of tracking results based on the system that we teach.
In our system, you can basically break trades down into four categories: Big losers, small losers, small winners, and big winners.
In order to have any chance of succeeding in the markets, you have to have a system. There is no other way around it. I’ve been trading for 20 years now, and I’ve trained over 1000 people. You don’t make money if you don’t have a technically valid system for entry and exits.
In our system, of the four categories of trades listed above, we simply don’t allow any of the first category, which is big losers. We always have a worst-case stop and we always stick to it. There should never be a scenario where you are still in a trade that is causing a significant loss if you follow our rules.
In terms of the other three categories, generally speaking, if you have about a third of your trades fall into each category, you should be making good money. In other words, if we have about 33% of our trades as small losers and 33% of trades as small winners, those basically would offset. That leaves the other 33% of so only as bigger winners, and that’s what we are here for. In our world, we count a loser as a trade that stops out (stops in our system are based on the price-level of the stock). We count a small winner as a trade that goes enough to make a partial and then either stops the second half of the trade under the entry or stops the second half of the trade slightly in the money, but no more than the partial was or so. Then the big winners are anything that keeps going beyond the partial.
So from now on, each month, we are going to create a report like the Futures and Forex results that tracks the number of trades that triggered each month (with market support) and how many fell into each of the three categories.
Tradesight Stock Results for October 2015
Number of trade calls that triggered with market support: 117
Number (and percent of total) of small losers: 31 (26.5%)
Number (and percent of total) of small winners: 45 (38.5%)
Number (and percent of total) of big winners: 41 (35%)
Obviously, in every sense, this is a terrific month for us. Winning trades in general were 73.5% of all trades, which is above the 67% that we want them to be. When you trade like this, you are definitely doing well as long as you capture those bigger gains when they are offered.
We will continue to post these results monthly along with the daily recaps, and we may even go back to January this year to put together the year’s results before 2016 begins.
To see the day by day breakdown of these trades, follow this link and go back to the posted reports from October 1 to October 31.