First, congratulations Surfer on a successful 2007.
I want to know how successful it really was. How can I calculate APY based on the statistics here? If you had started with a $5000 account, and traded two mini lots at a time (max 50p SL means never more than 2% at risk in any trade), you would have doubled your money. Not bad. Would that example be a 100% APY?
Code:
Cumulative Stats
Total: +2596 Pips
Number of Trades 234
Number of Wins 131
Number of Losses 98 (5 breakeven)
Win % 57%
Average Win: 36
Average Loss: 20
Average Pips/Month +210
R-Multiple 131.64
Also, I understand that the R-Multiple is the reward:risk ratio, but why do we add it together from all of the trades? Why don't we just take the average win:average loss? What does that 131.64 actually tell us?
If we take our average loss of 20p and multiply it by our R value, we get ~2600, which is what the overall pip gain was. Is this the correct usage?
Since our SL levels are based on different market conditions (i.e. where the latest swing high or low is,) what do multiple R-multiples of -1 really mean? Yes, we lost all of what we were prepared to lose on the trade, but what if this happened:
Three trades: two losers (R=-1) and one winner with R=2.2. We see that if we add our Rs, we get +0.2. How do we extract meaning from this, if we don't know what our stops were? If we knew that the stops were all identical, we would know that we came out ahead (say, -20*2 + 44 = +4). Since we don't know what the stops were, an R of 0.2 could mean two trades of -50 (R=-1 with 50p SL), and one trade of +44 (R=2.2 with 20p SL), which would be an overall loss (-50*2 + 44 = -56.)
So again, why do we add R-multiples over a long timeframe?