Before we get to February’s numbers, here is a short reminder of the results from February. The full report can be found here.
Tradesight Pip Results for February 2011
Number of trades: 30
Number of losers: 12
Winning percentage: 60%
Worst losing streak: 4 in a row (February 16-18)
Net pips: +235
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 2011
Number of trades: 37
Number of losers: 18
Winning percentage: 51.3%
Worst losing streak: 3 in a row (twice)
Net pips: +190
Although we had more winners than losers, three of the trades for the month were +75, +55, and +55 pips after partial and final exit. That about totals the whole gain for the month. As usual, the strategy works fine even when the number of losers rises a bit if you end up letting some of the trades play out.
Ranges, however, continued to drop in the month, which has been the story. We had more days under average range, and the EURUSD and GBPUSD both dropped 4 points of average daily range during the month, which is a lot when you consider that we’re taking six months of data into those averages. We did, however, see slight increases in ranges for pairs like the GBPJPY and EURJPY. Not everyone likes to trade the cross pairs, but they have been slightly more interesting on average.
The US Dollar remains at a critical point here and a move either way will likely start to see the ranges improve. We shall see. On to April…