Change in plan... or a return to the original

I've been busy the last days so I have not blogged much, not too much to blog about anyway.

I was trading the Q's on the side last time around but I sent an email to our trading room mod and suggested that we consider doing this in the room for some easy trades when not much else is happening with stocks and other ETFs. Within a day or two that is exactly what we started to do so I decided to drop my personal trading, it didn't make sense to keep going with it.

We've been trading for very small targets lately which puts me at a disadvantage given my slightly higher commissions. Having said that there are enough changes and orders that do not get filled that moving to another broker would end up costing about the same anyway until I get to much larger trading sizes. So I am in a holding pattern with regards to brokers and seeing small profits in my account. Of 14 trading days in July 5 have been losing days and 8 winning. I am up but not by much more than about $600.

I have been using a formula to calculate expectancy ratios without figuring in the commissions in order to continue to track the potential of our trading. What I will also be doing is running the numbers without commissions altogether in order to get a better idea of the win loss ratios in order to determine. I was going to change my spreadsheets to let the trades reflect this per trade but I am better to just set a field to display the gross numbers either per day or per month.

The issue with the smaller commissions is not a real factor if I were trading with larger positions though. Some traders are posting profits in excess of the $500 target while I may have seen $100. Obviously they may be getting smaller commission, not counting commissions or over stating their numbers altogether. I do not want to gauge my progress against others though. I will grow the account at my pace and that is the way it will go.

Of course I couldn't help but check to see how much larger of trades I would have to make in order to see similar gains to some of those higher numbers. I would have to be trading 4 times my current sizing. I have intentionally dropped my size in order to allow for a few more concurrent trades in my account as we have a good number of trades held for swing trading now that sucks up my cash. Right now, had I my full trading capital I could run 27 trades at my current sizing. Doubling my sizing would put me at 13 trades, which is about where I would want to be.

I'll be glad when we close out those swings.... for some profits.

Jeff.