Trade Tracker

Do you want every trade to be a winner?  Then you are just like the rest of us.

Did you know the desire to have every trade you take be a winner is a massive danger to your trading profits?  Why?  That desire, prevents your brain from seeing what the market is really doing.  That desire, stops you from keeping focused on price action and prevents you from trading strategically.  This desire, is why trading is marketed with ‘90% winners’ advertising.  When we do not reach a ‘90% winner’ ratio, it is reasonable to expect that we become frustrated.

An important question to ask when someone mentions they have a 90%, 80%, 70% or whatever winning percentage is, what is that percentage based on?  Is it based on a pool of 10 trades, 50 trades, 100 trades, a 1000 trades?  Is that percentage based on 1 market, 2 markets, 3 markets?  Or more markets?  Why ask these questions?

Let’s say a trading edge is really proven to be a 90% winner over the last 1000 trades.  Awesome right?  Maybe.  What is 90% of 1000?  That is 900 winners, awesome again, right?  How many losers does a 90% of a 1000 trades equal?  That equals 100 losers.  Again, not bad, right?  That all depends.  How many of those losers were in a row?  What if 5 of those losing trades were in a row?  What if 10 of those losing trades were in a row?  What if 20 of those losing trades were in a row?  Would the number of losing trades in a row destroy your confidence?  Could the number of losing trades in a row blow up your account?

A great exercise to help us remember that we never KNOW if the next trade will be a winner or loser is to flip a coin before you enter the trade.  While it is important to know the win to loss ratio of our trading edge, it is more important to remember that each individual trade has a 50/50 chance of providing us with profits.  The amount of profits and the amount of loss on each trade depends 100% on us the trader.

The purpose of the trade trackers below is NOT to show you how wonderful a trader I am or how wonderful my trading edges are.  One purpose of the trackers below, are to remind myself of the distribution of winning and losing trades.  Another purpose of the trackers are to remind me that even though my trading edges have been around for decades, they are still relevant.  The most important purpose of the trackers is to remind me that growing my profits is not based on a trading edge but on how I manage each trade.  If we do not manage our trades, winning trades can very quickly become losing trades.

How can you trade profitably when you do not know which trade will be a loser and which trade will be a winner?  You must learn how to manage each and every trade.  You must also have a strategic, consistent way to recover from losses.

DISCLAIMER: I do not take all the trades shown in the tracker.  I do not trade crypto.  The majority of my trades are placed in the currency and futures markets.  What the tracker represents is the relevance of my trading strategies in all markets – a powerful reminder to confidently wait for the next trade after taking a loss.  Also, remember that trades that should have been winners could end up be a losing trade for and individual trader due to their trade management mistakes.  It is VITAL for each trader to practice trade management in the historical market every day.

W = Trade could have been a winner.  L = Trade was a loser.  B = Trade could have been break even.