From Losing To Winning Trader – Edgewonk Review #9
This week we reviewed a very interesting journal from one of our users and a few things stood out that we want to share with you.
You can watch the whole review here:
The trader has relatively large swings in his performance graph but he is currently only at a -6% loss. It seems that good and bad trading phases seem to alternate for him. This is a great starting point because it means that he does certain things that always bring his performance back up to break-even.
After having worked with thousands of traders, we have recognized that struggling traders do not do everything completely wrong but there are certain patterns that a trader tends to repeat. Once a trader can find out what his big problem areas are, he/she can work on it targetedly. In this case, it was very obvious.
The trader used his Edgewonk entry and exit comments very well and after scanning through his trades, we found that he seems to be having issues with trade selection. He used entry comments for trades he entered too early or too late. This is a common issue with traders but many traders have no way of actually validating if this is an issue or how big of an impact such trades have. The graph below shows only those trades where he broke his rules.
But he also used entry comments to tag trades here he had a good entry, according to his rules. The next screenshot shows only his good trades. What a difference! He would have been up almost 50% instead of his current net loss of -6%.
Ok, you might think that this could have been predicted beforehand and you don’t need a journal to tell you that you are losing money by breaking rules. However, our experience shows that being able to validate that you could have easily been a profitable trader can cause a huge mindset shift.
Many traders report that just by remembering that they will have to come back to their Edgewonk trading journal and enter the trade, they will often skip bad trades because they don’t want to experience the same feeling of reliving their bad trades because they know in that moment of pulling the trigger that they are about to make a mistake.
How liberating and how big of a confidence boost is it when you can actually trade profitably and that your system is a profitable one if you’d just avoid the trades you knew are not worth taking?
Many traders will nevery have such a revelation if they don’t journal their trades and they will just jump from one trading method to the next because they wrongly believe that it’s their system that is the weakest link.
Once a trader makes the shift that it’s up to him to make it work and that profitable trading is within reach, he can often approach trading very differently. He moves from the right vicious circle to the left professional approach.
And this is just the start for this trader. As you will see in the review, we also found ways to improve trade management and other areas.
Edgewonk might seem complex at first but everything is there for a reason and you do not need to use everythign at once. You should progress from one feature and one performance-tweaking tool to the next. Start with the basics and get your equity graph into the right direction first, and then move on to the more advanced concepts to work on other areas of your trading.
In our trader development program (click here) we help you on your journey and show you exactly how to go about this.
