Cross checking the trading

I have been running some manual backtesting of the last 30 days or so of trading Global Gold using Horizons Betapro Global Gold bear and bull leveraged ETFs to give me more confidence in my trading plan. Although I know that it can work I felt I needed a little nudge to get me more motivated to get trading for real. It certainly helped. I'll post more about that once it is completed.

Today's performance was not so hot though as I think I over traded a bit and made a couple of calls for entry and early exits that cost me some profits as I was down about $70, (about 1/2 of my trading costs.)

This tells me that my trade setups and calls were mostly on the mark, the execution was a little lacking. I did get in at good and predictable prices so at least that was going for me.

Doing the back test for today had me making 12 trades, surprisingly the same number that I actually traded. Three were washes as the price did not move as anticipated shortly after the entry. I just applied rules not trying to make judgements based on anything else.

Total profits after commissions assuming some slippage was $176. Compared to my backtesting days even this was not a great day, that makes me feel a bit better, but not too much.

Applying my 30% fudge factor puts me at about $122 and if I took off my top two trades I would have seen $92.

Considering that today was my first real full run of this version of the plan for the entire day I don't think I did too badly. If I produced a gross loss (net loss greater than my trading costs) then I would be disappointed.

As it is, I still think there is a little tweaking to be had but the plan is sound.

Jeff.