How do you benchmark your trade performance?

I am interested to know from all you awesome traders, whether you have a system in place to gauge your personal trading performance daily weekly or monthly.

Recently while I was going through the screendumps of my trades I noticed that a lot of poor trade performance was attributed to not sticking to my rules. Had I been more patient on an entry, or put a more logical stop loss in place, or stuck to some other aspect of my strategy…most times the losers would have actually been winners! This surprised me as I assumed I was sticking to a plan and each loss resulted in me saying that its just another bad trade move on. This is a mistake and I wondered how a trader quantifies their discipline? I mean its easy to look at P/L ratios or win loss or pip count but are you really sticking to your rules every trade? Its easy to let discipline slip here and there and losses simply get chalked up to the “randomness of the market” but unless you can measure this somehow, you might have a serious trading blindspot that you are not aware of!

So now after each and every trade I input my results into an excel spreadhseet and I get an immediate performance update. Then daily weekly or monthly it allows me to benchmark myself and see whether my discipline is intact or slipping.

The way I came up with is pretty basic. I basically have 3 categories:
0. Bad trade (did not stick to my rules)

  1. Unlucky trade (Stuck to my rules but trade went against me)
  2. Good trade (I could not have implemented rules any better)

So the 3 categories above can be broken down further into sub categories. So a bad trade could be any reason below with a number of zero. An unlucky trade is any reason below with a 1. And a good trade could be any reason below with a 2.

(0)Did not enter at my target zone
(0)Did not wait for target price to be reached
(0)Cut trade early for no good reason
(0)Did not execute trade as per my trading plan
(0)Stop was not in a logical place
(0)Did not factor in imminent news release
(0)Risk reward ratio was less than 1:2
(0)Did not have correct SR level identified
(2)Good trade all rules were followed
(1)Unlucky spike or unknown event
(0)Poor news release trade
(2)Good news release trade
(2)Good execution of rules bad result though
(0)Poor decision to trade
(0)Should have seen the signs to exit early

So. Do you have anything similar that you can share?

1 Like

I think you hit on an important point there.

You can have a losing trade that was a good trade and a winning trade which is a bad trade.

You use the terms ‘unlucky’. I would personally refrain from such judgement

By labelling it so you are kind of expecting it to win, but did not. I don’t think we should have any expectations at all on a trade outcome.

It might seem a very minor point - but anything that gets in the way of elite trading performance should be examined.

You are correct though when you assess how well you executed and stuck to your plan.

That’s all we should be doing, focus on execution and not concentrate on the results.

It took me ages to figure that out and the sooner beginners realise that the better.

Far too much talk on this forum, of pulling daily profits out the market, are there any rich traders.

The focus in life generally should always be on the process not on the fruits.