Funky day today in the trading arena

Boy. Today started out good, nice gap down in the market, I was really looking forward to some trading, get a handful of trades in, make some money and maybe even get to bump my stats up.

The trouble with trading with a group is the classic "lowest common denominator". I suppose that it isn't so much the issue as people not following instructions. The main one is to not ask about anything that we are not actively trading or at least actively watching. Being in on time to get the pre-market setups is important but not critical. Although if someone is late don't expect a rehash of the whole setup as the rest are trading and the moderator is trying to help us get in and out of profitable trades. Then there is an assumption that the room is supposed to be a nice warm cuddly space, well, it's about trading. Most are there by choice to make money, not be coddled.

The long and short is there are many who are a distraction for all that are there for some serious reasons and that blew today's trade up. We had a nice $500 trade set and it ended up being a $50 trade as we had to exit early in order to return order to the room.

Ultimately the trade hit the $500 mark and then some...made it to about $700, but nobody was in it then.

Enough whining on my part, tomorrow is another trading day.

Looking at my stats now I have lowered the numbers due to the small trade today.

I have been using play sizing with my trades through this service so far and today I decided to up the ante by using all option trades at 10 contracts unless they are really expensive options...anything up to an average of $3.60. That allows for perhaps a larger trade and a smaller trade to have the same potential profit target as $1 on options seems to be the norm. This way a loser cannot lose more than a winner due to just having more losing contracts than winning ones.

Going back over my trades thus far I altered the contract counts to reflect this to see what the numbers could have been had I traded full size right away. I could have done this as we have not had a lot of concurrent trades running... even though I allowed for 6.

Total days traded: 11
Total trades closed: 24
Average daily net profit: $ 398.43
Average per trade net profit: $ 182.61
Total net return for the 11 days: 43.83%

Seeing as I would not have traded full size until play testing this is just a hindsight speculation...but interesting none the less.

I updated my stats including today's piddly trade.

Jeff.