Monday, September 17, 2007

R's and $

Thanks to the ongoing debate in the trading blogworld on how to track performance, be it R or $, we've received inquiries over the last year about what we use. When we first started trading, and for at least several years afterward (especially after any significant tweak to the system) we would log basically everything (how much we risked per trade relative to the profit made; absolute win/loss ratio, profit/loss, and intraday and daily charts of every trade). Now that we have just shy of a decade of trading experience under our belt, we just track monthly performance in terms of profit/loss, and numbers of trades.

We find the R/$ debate irrelevant -- both are important and new traders should log everything (and experienced traders should go back to logging everything when they make changes to their trading methodology). Who said you need to choose one over the other?

As an aside, we are going slightly stir-crazy with the lack of volume/set-ups in the market ... if any of you are feeling similar emotions, just know that we're in the same boat. Let's hope that with the FOMC meeting out of the way within 24hrs, trading will become more interesting.