Implementation of trading statistics by a trader
For more informed trading, you should know literally all the statistics of your work. It is very convenient to keep all records in an Excel spreadsheet, which will show your results based on the trades you have made. Listed below are the items that, in our opinion, should be included in these statistics.
A record of the parameters of each transaction:
- time, type (by, sell);
- Lot;
- price of admission;
- StopLoss and TakeProfit (discretionary);
- exit price;
- swaps/commissions;
- profit in the currency of the deposit;
- profit in pips;
- profit as a percentage of the deposit.
The main cells that will go into the stats will be:
– profit in deposit currency (it is possible to calculate the average profit per transaction - loss-making, profitable, as well as the transaction on average);
– profit in pips (it is very useful to observe how much on average you gain per trade, as well as how many pips you gain only in profitable trades and only in losing trades);
– profit as a percentage of deposit (same parameters as in the paragraphs).
Balance status after each transaction will be useful in the future for weekly, monthly and annual statistics, as well as for plotting the yield curve.
Based on the records of all transactions, statistics are kept on:
- total profit (the amount of money earned in profitable trades);
- total losses (only losing trades);
- net income (total income minus total losses).
Next: total number of deals, to which the percentage of profitable and percentage of losing deals is calculated. The average profitable and average losing deal is also calculated. Naturally, one should strive for the average profit to overlap the average loss. However, it can be the other way around, but only if the percentage of profitable trades exceeds the percentage of losing trades.
Separately it is necessary to speak about such a concept as profit factor (profit factor), which shows the ratio of total profit to total losses. A PF greater than one means that you are operating at a profit, i.e. total profit divided by total losses (without a minus sign) is greater than one.
Maximum profitable и maximum loss transaction in the deposit currency and points will be needed only as a "decorative element" of your statistics table.
The next point, which the table of statistics will be useful in daily work, is to calculate the risk per transaction. Above we said that the balance state after each trade will be useful for us. It can be used in the following way: you choose the risk percentage for the current trading day and record it in a separate cell. The table gives you the amount you are ready to risk in a trade, as well as the working lot. The working lot, it should be added, will also depend on the value of StopLoss, which you also write in a separate cell. From the author of this article StopLoss, risk percentage and working lot are placed in the "header" of the table, above the records of deals.
Bottom line as your balance changes, you will see how your risk per trade changes and follow this risk in trading. When the maximum loss for the day is reached, it is better to stop trading. But no one has ever forbidden to "cut" profits.
Try, experiment with different variants of keeping statistics, there can be no universal variant, everything has to be customized. And only one thing is certain: exhaustive knowledge of your trading statistics (and of yourself) significantly helps you to focus on those places that need to be improved, in our case statistics is needed to find weaknesses.