Tracking and Recording Trades

All, I was hoping that we could maybe discuss how we all go about tracking and recording our trades. I am sure that most people would agree that good record keeping is essential to track your progress. This can be a place for us to discuss our methods of recording and tracking our trades, no matter how simple or technical.

I supose that I will kick off the discussion. I have always kept a very simple excel spreadsheet that I would used to calculate my positions, record my trades and track my progress. It would do automatic calculations, however it could not cope very will when I would try to do trades outside that were not USD crosses. Also at the time I was trading short time frames. The other problem was that as time went by the numbers on my records would slowly deviate from my real account balance.

I have now moved on to trading higher time frames and multiple crosses that are not necessarily USD based. Similarly, I am holding positions for days now. It has made me try to think up a new method to calculate and record these trades, and has really opened up a can of worms in my head.

I now have the following problems floating around in my head:

1. Should I go for the automatic calculations, or should I key in the manual (and more accurate) information from my trading statement?
2. How can I best show the return of a trade that may last weeks off an account balance that is constantly dynamic (ie should it be based off the opening balance or the closing balance, or an average balance?)
3. For recording purposes, should I treat trades with multiple entries as one trade or separate trades?
4. Am I thinking too much about this?(!!!)
5. How should funds added and withdrawn should be treated, and how to smooth out the yield curve to correct this?

I think that half my problem is that my account is with Oanda, and thus there are no standard lot sizes.

I would love to know how over people have handled these problems, or even how other FF participants track their overall progress.

hi checkstar, sounds like a trading journal.

i'm using oanda, so what i do is i just copy and paste the data from the transaction report to excel, and move on with the analysis from there. i just take in the best trades and the worst trades, and review what i did then.

nice post, as i'm curious as to how others do it too...

Hi Rael

So you keep track of your trades by using Oanda's account history?

If so, just wondering, how do you associate or define a single trade? From my experience, you have one line for each action, ie you might go long in one pair, then do several other things before you close out that position. In between opening and closing the trade, a number of other trades go through in the account history. This I would imagine trade performance analysis a bit tricky?

I keep 2 spreadsheets;

One is a daily log that has time, pair, timeframe, long/short, reasons for entry, price, stop, target, exit plan, early exit, outcome, pips, p/l, lessons learned for every trade, and I've also taken to pasting a chart in that shows the setup. Every day is a new page.

The other spreadsheet keeps stats; every page is a month's worth. Each day has a column, with # trades, # profitable, pips gain, pips loss, $ gain, $ loss for the day.

It calculates acct balance (should match with broker), net pips, P/L, % gain, for the day, and for the week it calculates net pips, avg pips per day, % good trades, average gain, average loss, and % P/L.

for the month, all the same with expectancy also.

Data is input to a master page that shows month to month results.

Pips are meaningless since positions are different sizes, but that's left over from when I started the spreadsheet a year ago.

Sounds complicated, but it takes minutes a day at the most, and I consider the data to be extremely valuable in debugging and analyzing.

Thanks for sharing.

Thanks for the detailed description Blueruby. Just wondering, are all your calculations made in the spreadsheet? Eg can it calculate p & l per pip even if the cross you are trading is not in the same ccy as your account? (for example, if your account is in USD, and you are trading EURGBP, will it work out how much USD you earn per pip)

In the log I enter p/l and pips for each trade, so that could easily be calculated.

I only keep records of trades that I can learn something from, be it experience or lesson; into my blog, instead of using Excel

For each record, I record the following items: entry/stoploss/target/exit as well as notable updated stoploss/target if ever made;

for some 'important' trades, I will keep its chart snapshot as well which make it more traceable;

More important, I will add some notes to these records to analyze by which way can I get improved.

Interesting topic you've brought up, CHECKstar. It took my quite a while to get my head around how Oanda worked with its unit size and profit calculations. The question you ask about calculating profits if the trade is in a currency other than your home currency is explained here, http://www.fxtrade.com/tools/fxcalcu...lculator.shtml.
At the bottom of the page, it explains the way the profit is calculated with an example. In essence, your home currency, for you USD, has to be converted to the base pair, here GBP, in order to do a long or a short EURGBP trade. I think the conversion is made when the trade is closed, but it could be when it is opened, I am not sure which exactly. But this explains why a 100 pips trade in EURGBP will have a different profit value on different days for the same number of units, depending on the USDGBP rate at the time you make the trade.


As for the other questions:
1. I use 2 spreadsheets, one automatic and one with manual calculations. Automatic for an individual trade, ( I cheat and use a DDE feed out of MT4, which is close enough) and then manual input of the trade results into another spreadsheet to track the results of each trade (risk taken, p & l, number of trades, expectancy and so forth).
2. I always calculate trades in terms of %ages of the account balance at the time of opening. So risk is a %age of balance, p & l is a %age etc.
3. If my head tells me multiple entries are part of one trade, then I track it like that. If it says otherwise, I don't. I suspect you are entering each entry and exit as one line in a spreadsheet and summing up the totals at the end. This doesn't really work because the value of a trade fluctuates depending on conversion rate of your home currency at the time. That method works with CMC, for example, (a spreadbet operation) because all trades are valued by the number of £'s per point. So, with CMC it is irrelevant what the exchange rate of your home currency is. But with Oanda it is different. The easiest solution in the end was to have one spreadsheet that I call a scratchpad, that just calculates the fluctuation of what I define as a trade. At a minimum, this is opening a position and closing a position, with usually a partial scale out or two along the way, but could include adding in as the trade is underway. And then I input the end result manually into another spreadsheet for long term tracking expectancy etc.
3. Are you thinking about this too much? No. In my mind, I need to understand this aspect of trading, especially where Oanda is involved. I do not see how you can make accurate decisions about an amount to risk unless you considered how the risk, and thence the profit, is calculated. A huge advantage of Oanda is the "granularity", or ability to take trades in scaleable amounts from 1$ to 10 mill $. There is no point in increasing trade size until you prove to yourself that you can be consistently profitable.
4. Adding and withdrawing funds. I don't do this with Oanda, but this is a method I have used with stocks. The idea to use is that of Value Per Share (VPS). Say you put £100 into the pot when you start, and issue yourself 100 shares at £1 per share. After a year, the pot has risen to £200 (I wish), so your VPS has risen to £2 per share. Now your friend comes along and wants you to take his £50 and invest it for him. At the current rate he gets 25 shares (£50) and the number of shares has risen to 125 and the value of the pot is now £250. If the value of the pot now rises to £400, the VPS is 400/125 = £3.20 per share, and you own 400*100/125 = £320 and he owns 400*25/125 = £80. So if you track VPS, that gives you a good idea of how your trading is doing.
5. I also keep annotated snapshots of trades, taken with Hypersnap, which show a daily, 60 min and 5 min chart. The most interesting thing is to see how your comments change with time as a reflection of how you structure the price action you are watching. You need a mental model that gives meaning to the bars on the chart, and you can see the changes in that model over time very well via these snapshots. Any learning process needs feedback to change subsequent behaviour. Snapshots give feedback if you review them a few months later.
6. Overall progress is tracked via the equity curve, mainly because there isn't anything else except the equity curve...

Hope this is food for thought.

PS You look like someone who might be interested in FXHat. It analyses Oanda account history. I haven't used it myself.
http://fxhatweb.blogspot.com/

I have been looking for some time for a trade journal, a cross between a database and a written journal. The closest I have seen i this, https://www.stocktickr.com/,
but I am not keen on the web based subscription model, and would rather a stand alone application. Any ideas of what is out there?

tricky indeed. but i don't do this quite often. mostly on a weekly basis, and just checking on the best 3, worst 3 trades based on $ gains/losses, so that's not a lot to look at. so on those trades, i look for the close and refer back to the transaction link that opened the trade, pretty much ignoring what's in the middle.

after the analysis, i immediately incorporate the "lessons" into my trading system.

@blueskystarfish, fxhat looks promising, though i have yet to see a good resource that elaborates on it. jumping to another thread...