Tradesight officially added a Futures trade call service back in 2011, and two months ago we added a daily report for the futures service. This allows us to recap for archival purposes our results. Currently, we have 10 years of day-by-day trade results in our stock service (about 18 months worth available without a subscription in the Market Blog on the website). We have 7 years of day-by-day trade results for our Forex service (again with 18 months worth available without a subscription in the Market Blog). We have also been tabulating the monthly pip results in our Forex service for about 18 months as well. You can read those monthly results here.
Now that we have the daily Futures report, which you can scroll through here, we have an archive building of the Futures trade calls. With that, we will also be doing a monthly summary of net results.
A few words before we begin our first official monthly report. Our Futures service revolves around the Tradesight Futures Levels, which include a series of calculated support and resistance points that we teach how to use in our 10 our Futures training course. The goal of the course is to teach you how to use these levels so that you can use them all day long on the (currently) six contracts that we offer (ES, NQ, YM, ER, QM, and YG). We don’t set out to teach people how to follow our calls. Our courses teach you how to trade on your own, so you would never need our calls by themselves. The calls built into the services are example calls using the material that we teach to help people see the most valid setups that we can find. Because the ES is the most liquid and commonly traded contract, the majority of our calls for the service are in the ES, but we do reach out when we see better setups in the other contracts and make calls there. Someone who has taken the course, however, should be able to apply the rules and concepts to the contracts that they prefer, so if you like trading the QM (crude oil), there is no reason that you can’t. That’s why we provide the data. We simply offer a handful of calls daily that focus on key setups in the active times of day, and those calls are the ones that we summarize in the futures service daily (and archive). And those are the calls that we total up here, in the end of month report, for result tracking purposes.
So, with that out of the way, let’s dig into our first official month of results.
For tracking purposes, there is no adjustment for size in the results. Each trade is taken as an equal-sized trade, with an entry and stop (the stop on ES and NQ is always 6 ticks, sometimes more on something like the ER). We have a first target where we sell half and then we manage the second half of the trade to a final exit. So, these results assume the same size is taken on all trades, which in reality is not what should be done. For example, we came into the last week of June stating that between the already light market volume and the fact that the market would be focused on end of quarter window-dressing, the environment would be rougher. Our courses detail how to adjust for this in your trading size.
As always seems to be the case when launching a new product, the market wasn’t extremely cooperative for our first month. Volume has been way off and got worse as the month progressed. Despite that, we had a nice month going heading into the last week, but we net lost over 30 ticks in the last week (again, somewhat predictable based on volume and end of quarter, which kept intraday movement contained most of the days until the final big gap up on the last day of the month).
We track our results in terms of win/loss ratio and net ticks gained. Here is a breakdown of the month of June:
Number of trades: 60
Number of winners: 34
Win percentage: 56.7%
Net ticks: +16
Our goal in trading over time is to win between 60-70 percent of our trades. This month fell about 3% short of that, which is fine considering the environment. The other factor is that many of the trades that worked only hit their first target and then stopped out of the second half around the entry. While our trading system keeps losses tight and searches for a 60-70% win rate, the net results are really about the trades that play out for more than just the first target. Because of the narrow, choppy activity, we only had 5 or so trades in the whole month that really played out for bigger gains, and that is not a normal situation. Early July probably won’t be much better with the Holiday, but the rest of July will hopefully be improved in terms of range and hopefully market volume as well. We will analyze the trading results and compare the market environment for those results in greater detail in the future months.