Looking at the monthly chart above I had a lot of open equity in July and I gave a bit back. Around 12.5% - I can live with that. The results above also take into account all costs, tax payments, accounting fees etc, as well as any dividends and bank interest.
The closed trades equity curve, from January 2003 to present, above paints a different view and probably reinforces the idea that it is dangerous to count open profits as my own!
Monthly profits - again just looking at closed trades profits, although the September bar reflect open trades profits. This chart is the same way TradeSim plots monthly profits on simulations.
I sold a lot of stock last month whilst on holidays up north, not the most ideal spot to be trading. A couple of years ago I spent a month in Europe and didn't need to exit any trades. Trading weekly makes it a lot easier to go away for a few weeks. August 2007 however wasn't a good time to take a week off, but I did enjoy myself.
The main thing is that I followed the system, whilst I know of others that thought that they would wait till the price went up a bit before they got out, or worse still, they ignored the system! Both approaches leave me speechless. I give myself quite a bit of flexibility by using a weekly time period already, but to actually break my system rules is unthinkable.
I am reading "Way of the Turtle" by Curtis Faith and am pleasantly surprised that it is very readable, although I am only up to Chapter 3. Outcome bias is mentioned in Chapter 2 - the tendancy to judge a decision by it's outcome rather than by the quality of the decision at the time it was made. Holding on past the sell signal may have given a better outcome in hindsight but was the wrong thing to do in terms of following a trading system. I am sure that a lot of dot.com disciples that still hold some worthless dot.com company might, in hindsight, agree with me.
stevo
