Custom Statistics Usage Examples

Custom Statistics Usage Examples

The Edgewonk Custom Statistics are one of the most powerful tools available in our professional trading journal – why? Because you can use them in any way you want, combine them with the other already powerful Edgewonk evaluation tools and completely customize your journaling experience.

Here are some usage examples to spark your creativity:

1. Timeframe

In the beginning of a trading career, almost every trader is overly concerned with the granularity of the markets. Should I trade 5 minute charts or daily charts? What is better? Which is easier? Where is less noise?

In the end, the choice of the trading timeframes comes down to personal preferences, characters traits and the time available.

Setting up one Custom Statistic to track the different timeframes can help you find out what works best for you and show you where you make the best trades. Here we suggest tracking the timeframes that you used the execute your trade.

2. Trading session

Volatility and liquidity constantly change when new information or money enters and leaves the market. Many Forex strategies that work during the Asian session will have trouble during the London & New York crossover for example. Also, different currencies behave differently during the trading sessions.

As a stock, futures or CFD trader, you probably know that price behavior, volatility and momentum can differ significantly between the time right after the open, just before the noon lunch-time trading session or during the afternoon.

It pays off to know during which times your strategy performs best and then focus on those sessions exclusively. This makes your trading more time-effective and more cost-effective.

As a Forex trader, we suggest setting up one Custom Statistics to track the different trading sessions: Asia, Europe, New York. And as a stocks or futures trader, you could set up a Custom Statistics that tracks the different intraday times: Open, pre-lunch, post-lunch, afternoon, pre-close.

3. Big Round Numbers / Quality Of Support And Resistance Levels

If, for example, you trade a break and retest strategy, you could track if a big round number (price levels ending with .00) stops your trades from reaching the take profit target or whether it does not influence your performance.

You could also track how many touches a support/resistance level took before you set your trade. That being said, you can of course also incorporate this information into your setup itself – just name it “2^nd retest”, “3^rd retest”, etc.

4. Exit condition

Knowing why you exited a trade is important, but understanding how different exit decisions impact your performance takes performance analysis to a completely new level. Here are a few examples of  how an exit condition Custom Statistic could look like:

5. Market Condition

Many traders endorse a top-down approach: they look for trends on higher timeframes and then for entries on lower timeframes in that direction. With the Custom Statistic you could track whether your trade is going with or against the bigger trend.

You could also track statistics like risk on/risk off, high/low volatility (based on VIX numbers), high/low liquidity or ATR (Average True Range) values; it’s up to you really and the possibilities are endless.

6. Confluence

The more factors of confluence you stack in your favor in a trade, the higher the probability of turning a profit usually becomes. You could either use this statistic as a pure counter (2 confluence factors, 3 confluence factors, etc.) or you could use combinations of factors and tools, e.g. “Fibonacci 50%”, “Fibonacci 50% + Support/Resistance”, “Fibonacci 50% + Support/Resistance + MA Cross”, etc.

The important thing here is: You will quickly see which confluence factors perform better and which things do not impact your performance.

7. Price action or formation

Although you can add a screenshot to your trades that show the entry and the type of trade, it can pay off to dedicate one Custom Statistic to track the actual entry trigger. If you are a price action trader, you could use Custom Statistics for actual price formations or patterns; and if you are an indicator trader, you could track things like convergences, divergences, cross-overs etc.

8. News

News is a topic that is usually underrated, in the way that traders simply ignore it.

If you do not follow news reports, and don’t want to, at least consider tracking whether and how your trade was influenced by high impact news. There are lots of great economic calendars out there, e.g. the one by Forex Factory.

Of course, you could also track the outcome of the news (bearish/bullish, hawkish/dovish) and whether your trade was aligned with or against the news.

9. Psychological and personal factors

Psychology deeply affects our performance. Why not start tracking whether you had a workout before trading? Or whether you slept well? Or how you feel generally: do you want to trade, do you feel passionate about it, or do you only trade today because you feel like you have to trade? Maybe you feel depressed or overly happy?

It pays off to track these factors – and then create rules around them. Here are a few examples of psychology related Custom Statistics:

Conclusion: Dissecting And Improving Your Trading Strategy Has Never Been So Easy And Efficient

Trading is essentially an information war. You compete with incomplete information against other players with incomplete information. Whoever has the most and best pieces of information and knows how to put them together in an efficient way, and then takes the correct action upon it, will win. Edgewonk helps you do just that. It gives you the right information and then provides actionable tips on how to adjust with your trading.

The Custom Statistics are often the missing piece in the puzzle of any other trading journal. Some of the examples in this article come from our users and if you have found a great Custom Statistic usage example, we’d love to hear from you in the comments below.