Question: evaluating performance

Hi everybody,
please excuse me for my bad english; I need someone's guidance into a matter I'm a little confused with. I'm in the process of evaluating my own activity through live trading and slowly increasing the risk levels (20 trades turns, as - what an enlightening advice that was for me ! thanks again - somewhere suggested by diallist).

When calculating your performance statistics how do you treat different exits from the same entry ?


Do you consider the whole as a single trade with an absolute return or do you count every single portion's entry-exit as one trade? The latter is what I've been doing for simplicity but somewhat I'm not sure if this approach is correct.

In effect I'm not even sure if the perspective from which this doubt arises has any validity, but since in the last months for the first time I've had something substantially different from a blind gorilla's lucky shot to congratulate myself about, I would like to be as sure as I can about the framework I'm shaping, and actually I see maybe the strongest contribution to what I consider a nice turn in the way I do and see things comes from this forum, so allow me to ask a little attention from you guys.

Thanks in advance and sorry for the dumb Q.

Happy and prosperous trading to all,

QG

Sorry to take so long to answer your query. Evaluating performance is one of my pet subjects at the moment.

In MT4 I always enter a code in the comments field when entering a trade. As far as evaluating exits then this is one of my criticisms of MT4 because it is not possible to change the value in the comments field, or even add to it. Secondly, broker comments corrupt my data (SL gap etc)

The only way is to transfer your actions straight to a spreadsheet or database for evaluation, rather than hoping to export those crummy MT4 reports and make some sense out of them. More work but better results.

Hoping you are still here, I would be interested in the outcome of your question, since it looks as though you had to answer it yourself! By the way, your English is excellent, thanks.

Or anybody elses comment, really.