Be Profitable With Edgewonk - Your Professional Trading Journal

Hi FF community,

Edgewonk is a highly sophisticated trading journal, developed by professional full-time traders themselves, that provides you with unique statistics and suggestions based on the input from your trades.

If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it. A journal should be the center of all your trading. And while it says in almost every trading interview, book, blog, and many other resources, that traders absolutely do need a journal, there are very few viable options out there. The truth is, most traders don't use a journal. But it is also a fact that there are no successful traders out there that do not use a journal.

Now Edgewonk is not the simple statistics-loaded overkill of useless numbers which won't tell you anything other than at what rate your account is shrinking. It has unique metrics, and it actually tells you where you are leaking money. It tells you where to improve and gives you a real chance to become profitable.

The New Edgewonk 1.6 Is Here - Developing Your Edge Has Never Been Easier. Don't Miss It And Set Yourself Up For Trading Success in 2016!

 

1. Testimonials By Professionals & Customers
2. Special Offer: Switch Now To Edgewonk And Save $$

► Free Trial
http://www.edgewonk.com/free-trial/

► Free Ebook "The 7 Steps To Entering The Perfect Trade" And Trading Plan Template
http://www.edgewonk.com/find-perfect-trade-free-ebook/

► Free Edgewonk Trading Tools
Follow the link above to access a variety of easy to use tools to help you turn your trading into a business
-Strategy Profitability Check
-Losing Streak Analysis
-Trading Income Calculator
-Position Sizing Calculator
-Easy Charting & Screenshot Widget

Additionally, if you sign up for our free trial, you will receive these two incredibly useful tools to boost your trading as well - for free:

-Trading Plan Template (check out what it does here)
-Emotions Cheat Sheet (what do different emotions tell you about your trading, and how to fix these leaks)

► 12 Weeks Advanced Journaling & Trader Development Program

► Free High Quality Trading Education
Articles
Educational Videos

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► Thread Table Of Contents

1. 4 Ways To Improve Your Performance With Edgewonk
2. How Edgewonk Keeps You From System Hopping
3. Improving Your Trade Management (Video)
4. Growing A Small Account In Less Time
5. Understanding Losing Streaks (Video)
6. Dealing With Losses
7. Another 8 Ways To Improve Your Performance With Edgewonk
8. Overcoming Psychological Biases Part 1
9. Overcoming Psychological Biases Part 2 (Video)
10. The Most Powerful Tool In Journaling: Edgewonk Custom Stats (Video)
11. Practice, Skills And Performance - How To Improve As A Trader
12. How To Systematically Dissect Your Trading Strategy
13. Kickstart Your Trading Career: Time Spent Trading vs. Time Spent Studying
14. The Typical Trader's Life Cycle
15. What You Do Vs. What You Should Do As A Trader, And In Life
16. How Edgewonk Will Become Your Personal Trading Mentor
17. How Winrate And Position Size Impact Your Level Of Risk (Video)
18. Your Risk Of Ruin In A Nutshell (Video)
19. What The Edgewonk Holding Time Analytics Tell You About Your Trading Habits
20. How To Find The Best Position Sizing For Your Trading in 3 Steps (Video)
21. Results- vs. Process-Oriented Thinking And How To Think Like A Professional Trader (Video)
22. The Powerful Edgewonk Custom Statistics In Action (Video)
23. 9 Ways For Organising Your Trading Desk And Becoming More Effective
24. The Psychology Of Losing - Conquer Your Neanderthal
25. The Art Of Learning
26. How To Test Alternative TP/SL Strategies With Edgewonk
27. The Differences Between A Trading Diary And A Trading Journal
28. There Is NO Perfection In Trading
29. How To Improve Your Trade Entry, Stop Loss & Take Profit Strategy
30. Stop System Hopping NOW And Make YOUR Strategy Work
31. 5 Steps That Will Take You From Losing To Winning Trader
32. 4 Ways To Instantly Minimize The Impact Emotions Have On Your Trading
33. Are Higher Time-Frames Really Easier To Trade?
34. The 5 Stages Every Trader Has To Go Through On His Way To Profitability
35. Are You Setting Your TPs And SLs Correctly? How Much Money Do You Lose Due To Trade Management?
36. How To Set Yourself Up For Trading Success In 2016

To get a first idea what Edgewonk is all about, take a look at our video that shows you the power of journaling in action.

Give it a try and finally take the first step to getting your trading on the right track - we would love to hear your comments and suggestions.

Trade well,
Moritz

Rolph, i'm a long time follower of your great work, i just wanna congratulate you and wish you good luck.

Best,
B.R.

Hi bassramy,

thank you very much for the kind words. Rolf is on a long-distance flight at the moment so i'll gladly answer for him.

If you liked our work in the past then i'm happy to tell you that additionally to our paid Edgewonk Trading Journal we put together a place where we offer free high-quality educational content for aspiring traders: http://www.edgewonk.com/learn/

It will continually be updated with new stuff in the future .

Trade well & bests,
Moritz

Hi guys,

some of you will be wondering what a professional journal can do for you and why it goes far beyond the spreadsheets that most traders are using - we got some answers for you right here. Take your time, it will be worth it and your trading account might just be very thankful.

4 Ways To Increase Performance With Your Trading Journal

The majority of traders believe that in order to become a better and profitable trader, they just have to find the right trading strategy that will provide them with perfect entry opportunities and signals them exactly what to do and when to do it. In reality, this is far from how trading works. If you want to become a profitable trader you have to constantly adjust your approach and make little tweaks to your trading method to make it work.
Trading profitably is not about finding the best entry signal method. Trading profitably is maximizing your winnings, while not losing too much on your losses and finding ways to increase performance away from indicators or fancy trading tools.

#1 Learn how to eliminate losses
Finding out which types of trades are not profitable for you is the first step. Usually, while your trading strategy is not unprofitable altogether, it might work better on certain instruments and fail on others.
Traders misjudge their performance and believe that their inconsistent results are caused by a mediocre trading method. Taking one trading method and applying it to different forex pairs, stocks, timeframes, market types and other variables are usually the cause for mixed trading results.
Only if you can find out which trading methods work on which instruments and under which conditions, you can eliminate unprofitable trades and do more of what works already.



#2 Improve your order placement
Traders focus the majority of their time on the most irrelevant things: finding entries. But, what separates the professional from the amateur trader is how he optimizes his trades.
The stop loss and take profit placement has a direct impact on your performance. There are four different possibilities how you can screw up your take profit and stop loss placement:

1. You set your stop loss orders too close and price takes you out by a few pips
2. You set your stop loss orders too far away and reduce your risk reward ratio
3. You place your take profit orders too close and limit your winning trades
4. You place your take profit orders too far away which causes price to turn around ahead of your profit target and leaves you with nothing

It is so simple to overcome these issues and optimize the way you place your orders, yet almost no trader is aware of how to accomplish it. By tracking how close price came to your orders during the duration of your trade, you can easily adjust the way you place your orders. Optimizing stop loss and take profit orders will increase your winrate, your risk reward ratio and your overall performance.

#3 Optimize your trade management
So by now you have eliminated unprofitable trades and improved your stop loss and take profit placement. But once you are in a trade, there are multiple ways to ruin everything and the three most common mistakes are:

1. Moving stop loss orders too close and you are taken out by a small retracement before price goes to your take profit order.
2. Taking profits too early, ahead of your original take profit order although price would have made it to your target.
3. Widening stop loss orders because you believe that the trade is good and price will turn around any minute.

Every trader is guilty of doing at least one of the three on a regular basis. All of the described scenarios inevitably result in a reduced performance, inconsistent results and an unprofessional attitude.
Again, these negative actions can be eliminated easily and effectively by tracking the right data in your trading journal. Finding the optimal trade management strategy is not complicated and by following a structured approach, you can increase your performance while eliminating the guesswork.

#4 Avoid emotional trading decisions
Every trader knows that emotions play a big role but knowing how to deal with emotions is a completely different game. Repeatedly making wrong trading decisions based on emotional trading is among the top reasons why traders fail.
There are three tips how you can fight emotional trading and trade free from psychological pressure.

1. Track your trade management decisions in order to allow for a quantifiable evaluation of your trading decisions
2. Track emotions that experience during your trade
3. Implement a warning system that alerts you when you repeatedly break your trading rules

As you can see, your trading journal is much more than just a place track data and crunch numbers. A good trading journal acts as your personal trading mentor who helps you stay on track.

Conclusion: Only focusing on entries is a waste of your time and money
As you can see, there are multiple ways when it comes to increasing trading performance and improving your general trading behavior. The professional trader understands that there is more to trading than just looking for the next best indicator or entry method. By tracking and evaluating the right data in your trading journal, you can easily come closer to your dream of becoming a successful trader.

Thank you so much for your time and trade well,
Moritz

Hi guys,

we also have a Youtube channel at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0A...NDe3gRCWGLYiiA - there is a lot of no-nonsense high quality content in there for newer and more seasoned traders alike.

Make sure to subscribe to receive all our future content. It's worth it.



Trade well & Happy Easter!
Moritz

Hi guys,

after a lot of eating and hiking, fortunately Easter is done for this year .

Two weeks after launch we already received some great feedback! You can read what traders think about Edgewonk here: http://www.edgewonk.com/testimonials/.

We also offer free tools for the aspiring trader on our website - these calculate and explain a few very vital statistics and concepts for you that everyone should have at least an idea about. You can download them here: http://www.edgewonk.com/free-tools.

-Risk Analytics Tool
With this tool you can simulate how different trading parameters such as your winrate, RRR, the risk % per trade, and the amount of trades you take in a certain period of time, interact and how they influence your performance.

-Streak Evaluation Tool
Calculate likelihood and impact of losing streaks that will inevitably happen in everyone's trading and escape the recency bias by knowing the numbers.
Regarding this incredibly underestimated topic you can also take a look at our educational video:



-Income Calculator
Want to go pro? You better have a realistic plan then. With this tool you can estimate what size your trading account has to be in order to fullfill your expectations based on your trading performance.

-Emotions Cheat Sheet
Emotions play quite a big role in everyone's trading. To be able to know which emotions influence your trading decisions and what to do about it to avoid unnecessary trading mistakes, print out our emotions cheat sheet and put it next to your monitor.

With these tools you can add often overlooked skills and knowledge to your trading toolbox, which is essential in order to make it in the markets.
Should there be any questions, let me know.

Trade well & bests,
Moritz

Additionally to Forex, Stocks & Commodities we now also support Futures.

And if you belong to the 95% of traders that just can't stop system hopping and thus will never become profitable, here is a goodie for you .

http://www.edgewonk.com/how-a-profes...ystem-hopping/

Trade well & bests,
Moritz

Hi traders,

as you might know...the hardest part of trading is not entering a trade, no. Management and exits are by far the most important thing in trading to give you the so much needed edge. Yet most people don't know how to improve their management skills because they don't even know how they perform when managing a trade versus just using the set & forget method.

Edgewonk will help you solve this problem. It measures the profitability of your trade management and tells you where you are making mistakes. Just take a look at the video.



Give your trading a chance by focusing on the important areas right from the start.

Moritz

Hi everyone,

one of the biggest problems of most traders is undercapitalization. Many things have been written about the challenges and detriments brought upon a trader who is trading a small account. That being said, it is not impossible to grow a small account into a successful trading career. Let's see what part Edgewonk can play in helping you reach your goals.

http://www.edgewonk.com/wp-content/u...mb_account.png

There are three main problems when it comes to trading a small account, all of which are reasons why it is much harder to become a professional trader and earn a meaningful amount of money trading when you start out small:

#1 It takes long to grow a small account and you dont produce a satisfying income
It takes a very long time to grow a small trading account and it can be frustrating when you trade for 1 or 2 years but you only make a small amount of money.

#2 Your winning trades are small
Your winning trades will be very small with a small trading account and sometimes you have to wait several hours or even days until you get a trading signal only to make a few Dollars.

#3 Its hard to be disciplined and follow your rules 100%
Because it takes so long to grow a small account and your trades are very small, it is harder to follow your plan and not make trading mistakes. Trading mistakes cost a lot of money, especially when your trading account is small.


This is how Edgewonk helps you grow a small account
We at Edgewonk thought about how we can help smaller traders become profitable much faster and how to set-up your Edgewonk trading journal so that it provides you with specific and easy to follow tips on what to change about your trading strategy to make more money with a small account.

#1 Find out how to make more money faster with professional position sizing and risk management
Edgewonk is unique because it analyzes your current trading performance and simulates your future trading performance. With the unique trading metrics and the trading simulator you can test different position sizing strategies and find out how to change your risk in order to grow your trading account faster, in a safe and sound way!
Find out what your best trades are based on your personal trading behavior and performance. Then adjust your risk properly.

#2 Eliminate whats not working and increase your winrate
Because Edgewonk is the first and only trading journal that is fully customizable to your own trading style, you can see exactly which trades are not working and where and why you are losing money. But even better, your Edgewonk trading journal shows you exactly what to do to stop losing and how to increase the money you make on your profitable trades.

#3 Avoid trading mistakes and become a professional trader
It is very hard to know what you are doing wrong specifically. Your Edgewonk journal tracks how you manage your entries, your trade exits and whether you make mistakes during your trades that cost you money. You can then see what you are doing wrong and stop doing it.
Edgwonk is the only trading tool and trading journal that analyzes your trading mistakes which cost you a lot of money. Additionally, Edgewonk also analyzes your emotions and psychology and helps you become a professional trader almost instantly.

Conclusion: Growing a small trading account is not easy, but Edgewonk can help you make your dream come true
We know that a big reason why so many traders fail is because they dont have much money and their trading account is very small. Edgewonk is the perfect fit for every trader. It does not matter whether you have a big trading account and just want to find ways to fine-tune your trading approach or whether you are a new trader with little money who needs help to make his way. Edgewonk is the first and the only trading journal that tackles all the problems traders have and helps them make more money.

http://www.edgewonk.com/wp-content/u...allaccount.png

Losing is part of the game. As soon as you accepted this, it's only a matter of how you deal with it. The easiest way to do this in our opinion is to understand the mathematics behind losing streaks. You should always know in which cycle the market which you are trading is at the moment.

Just like that you should also always know in which cycle of your strategy you are the moment. Take a look at the video below and make trading a lot easier by understanding this simple yet horribly underestimated concept.

Hi traders,

in the last video you learned about the maths behind losing streaks. Now we show you how a professional trading journal helps you deal with the losses. Enjoy!

4 Tips To Avoid Amateur Mistakes When It Comes To Dealing With Winners And Losers

Understanding how wins and losses impact your trading performance and also how the outcome of your trades influences your actual trading decisions is important for every trader. We at Edgewonk understand this concept and thus built our trading journal in a way that allows traders to deal with these issues more effectively.

#1 Learn how to deal with a low winrate
Accepting that you cant win every trade and that a high winrate is usually not achievable and, even more important, not necessary, is the first step towards dealing with losses more professionally.

However, this is easier said than done as adopting new beliefs is not that easy and takes a long time. But there are some tricks and ways how you can understand your performance better and also find ways to deal with losses more effectively.

The screenshot below shows how the Edgewonk trading journal uses the so-called traffic lights to indicate the expectancy of your trades. Whenever you see a green light, it means that the risk reward ratio is great enough for your current winrate. A red light shows that your risk reward ratio is too small. If a trader only focuses on taking trades where he has green lights, regardless of the outcome of the trade, he can significantly improve his performance and trade more objectively, detached from his emotions.



#2 Psychological impacts of wins and losses
Traders usually make the same mistakes over and over again and it is important to understand in which way past trades influence our trading behavior. Psychologist call this phenomenon recency bias where the outcome of our past trades influences our performance significantly:

1. After a loss traders are more insecure, dont trust their strategy and tend to miss trades
2. After multiple losses traders tend to take larger than usual positions or take more trades that dont meet their criteria to make up for the losses faster
3. After winning trades traders feel invincible and neglect their trading rules, lose their discipline and take more risks because they believe that they suddenly became better traders

Needless to say that such behavior results in more frequent losses, a greater underperformance and also establishes a bad and unprofessional trading attitude.
The screenshot below shows the Tiltmeter of the Edgewonk trading journal which analyzes your trading behavior and how well you respect your rules. Whenever a trader repeatedly breaks his rules, the Tiltmeter rises and provides warning signals that the trader needs to step back to gain his focus again and so avoid larger drawdowns.

#3 Understanding winning and losing streaks
Traders usually dont understand that winning and losing streaks are normal and when they occur, they believe that it is their fault. Traders who change their approach or change the parameters of their trading strategy in losing streaks make a fundamental mistake because they reset their learning curve and have to re-learn strategies.

Losing streaks are unavoidable and even the best traders will have losing streaks. There is nothing you can do about it. Just stick to your rules, follow the plan and it will end eventually.

The risk simulator of the Edgewonk trading journal analyzes your current performance and trading behavior and then projects it into the future. Furthermore, it provides a statistical output about the likelihood of winning and losing streaks that help you to understand your performance better.
If you know how likely it is to have a losing streak of x trades with your current strategy, it will be much easier for you to fight through it and eventually come out ahead.



#4 Think long term
Start thinking like a casino and adopt a long-term view. Amateur traders make the mistake that they want to make the home-run trade that goes on for weeks, over hundreds of pips and makes them a fortune. In the meantime, they take a lot of small losses that amount to a substantial loss over time.

The professional trader understands that trading profitably is about following a consistent routine and continuously making good trades. The risk simulator of the Edgewonk trading journal projects your performance into the future and visualizes your future performance.

Visually seeing your potential account development helps to build trust in your trading strategy and takes out the guess-work when you can finally understand that even small but consistent gains allow you to grow your trading account.



Conclusion: If you understand your performance, you can make better trading decisions
As traders we have all heard the usual wise quotes, advice and tips that will help you cope with losses and emotions more professionally. But unless you take your own trading behavior and performance and try to fully understand every little nuance of it, it will remain a vague and abstract concept. Numbers never lie.

There are many services that automatically summarize your trading performance. They won't help you to become a better trader though. Knowing your Sharpe Ratio won't make you magically start printing money.

Benefits Of Manually Entering Trades Into Your Trading Journal

Entering trades in your trading journal might seem like a tedious task, but adding new trades manually has a variety of positive effects on your trading and will help you become a better trader. Traders ask us every day why we do not offer the possibility to automatically import trading data into our Edgewonk trading journal. We hope the following point will help you understand why we deliberately do not offer such a function.

#1 Reinforcing the learning effect without the real time market pressure
The vast majority of traders enters their trades and after they have closed the position forgets about what has happened. Coming back to your trades and actively entering trade data into your trading journal reinforces the learning effect because you have to replay all past events once again without the real time stress of moving markets and without emotional impacts that come from exposure after entering a trade.

Reviewing your trades after letting some time pass enables you to objectively analyze what you did. Revisiting entries, exits and your general trade management enables traders to spot weaknesses easily and effectively. Traders who dont actively keep a trading journal are missing out on some of the most important aspects when it comes to building a strong foundation.

Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
George Santayana

#2 Random vs. helpful statistics
Although some services exist that automatically analyze some of your trading performance, they are missing the point of keeping a trading journal in the first place. These automatic services exclusively focus on providing a variety of statistical figures, but is it really helpful to know your Sharpe Ratio, the Standard Deviation or the Z-Score of your trading performance? Wouldnt it add a lot more value if your trading journal could analyze how you managed your trades and show you precisely whether you are doing the correct thing or whether you are losing money?

Furthermore, imagine you could analyze whether you are breaking your trading rules and to what degree psychology and emotions are impacting your performance. And wouldnt it be incredibly helpful if you could evaluate how your personal setups and trading strategies perform separately, instead of throwing all available data into one pot and compare the incomparable?

#3 Individualization and quantifying personal data
The previous point leads us directly to the last and maybe even most important advantage of manually keeping a trading journal. A manual trading journal offers the possibility to fully customize it to your own needs. You can add your own trading rules to evaluate them and you can assign the problems that you face regularly in your trading. And even more important, you can quantify the impacts of all of these variables.

Every trader is different and each one of us faces individual and unique challenges on our path to becoming a consistently profitable trader. Using the same, standardized trading journal will not be of any help because the journal does not know what is most important for you and where you are struggling.

Only through manually adding new trades to your trading journal and going over each trade separately does it become possible to personalize your trading data. Additionally, if your trading journal does not offer a mathematical approach to analyze and quantify psychology, which is unique to Edgewonk, notes about emotions and personal comments about your trades offer little to no help. This is also a problem when using self-made spreadsheets or loose notes most of the time they just end up being statistical dead weight.

Conclusion: Dont try to look for shortcuts. Commit to becoming a professional trader
We are aware that entering trades manually requires time and discipline and traders try to avoid it at all costs. However, we found that using a manual trading journal provides a variety of benefits and it helps traders to improve their trading much faster.

Shortcuts seldom work and if you really want to succeed in this business, you have to be willing to put in the work.

Hi traders,

Forex can be easy if you know how to pick the variables that really impact your performance. If you don't know what to focus on, you will never make it. If you haven't been making money during the last few days in the EURUSD, DAX or BUND, there is something fundamentally flawed with your strategy.

How to fix the leaks? Take a look.

8 Ways To Improve Your Performance With Edgewonk

Trading is a complex business and when it comes to improving trading performance, every trader has its own tips and tricks. However, these suggestions are usually very subjective and individual. The Edgewonk trading journal is built with only one purpose in mind: to show you exactly what to change to increase your performance. Below we show you 8 ways how the Edgewonk trading journal can help you to turn your trading around and how you can find ways to improve your performance.

1. Increase the size of your winners
Edgewonk analyzes how you place your stop loss orders and provides clues when you are setting them too far away thus discounting your reward:risk ratio and therefore the size of your potential winners. By setting stop loss orders closer, a trader can increase the size of his winning trades.

How? When the drawdown is low, it means that you set your stop loss orders too far away and price never comes close to your stops. When you see very low values for your drawdown, use smaller stop loss orders.

http://www.edgewonk.com/wp-content/uploads/Drawdown.png

2. Get a higher winrate
How often have you seen price turn ahead of your take profit order and you had to give back all your unrealized profits? Traders often have the problem of setting take profit orders too far away and although their trade idea was correct, they did not make any money. By analyzing how you set your profit targets and how price behaves, Edgewonk provides tips how to adjust your profit placement to capitalize on your unrealized profits.

How? When the updraw is low, you set your take profit orders too far away. Use smaller take profit orders when your updraw is low.
http://www.edgewonk.com/wp-content/uploads/Updraw.png

3. See how to professionally adjust your risk management
Professional traders know that not all trades are the same. A system with a lower winrate should use a smaller position sizing strategy to avoid big account balance swings. By individually analyzing setups, strategies, instruments and qualities of trades, you can find out the individual winrate for all aspects of your trading and then adjust your position sizing.

How? The risk simulator projects your future performance. Use the filters to get a feeling of what to expect. When you see that the swing in your balance are too big, reduce the position size for specific setups, instruments or qualities of trades.
http://www.edgewonk.com/wp-content/u...simulator2.png

4. Filter out unprofitable trades
Most traders trade a variety of instruments and also have different trading strategies which they follow. Havent you also had the feeling that some strategies and setups work better on some instruments than on others? Some traders even report that some strategies work better for buy trades, but quantifying the difference is not easy since conventional trading journals or self-made spreadsheets do not include a professional analytic approach.

How? With Edgewonk you can track your own, personal trading strategies and then analyze your trading performance fully individually. All your data is tracked and analyzed separately for individual instruments, trading strategies and setups, qualities of trades and the direction of trades. This analytic approach enables you to find out exactly which trades and scenarios are unprofitable for you.
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5. Break bad habits and stop making mistakes
A main reason why traders continuously lose money is because the violate their trading rules, make emotional trading decisions and repeat the same mistakes over and over again. Being aware of how much you are actually losing and when you commit to certain mistakes is a big step towards professional trading.

How? Create your own comments and tags. You can choose to create comments for your most common problems and violations. Then, you each time you make such a mistake, assign the comment to a trade. In the last step, you can quantify the impacts of your mistakes and find out when you make the most mistakes.
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6. Alternative stop loss and take profit strategies
Traders often wonder if a different take profit or stop loss strategy would perform better, but the way of finding out is tedious and takes a lot of effort. Maybe fixed stop loss and take profit orders would be better, is taking profits at previous highs beneficial, or would a trailing stop be the best thing for your performance? Instead of opening several accounts and simultaneously testing all those variables, we have a faster approach for you.

How? In Edgewonk you can track the outcome of up to 4 different stop loss and take profit strategies. For every trade, just note down the outcome of the specific alternative strategy and compare it to your current performance.
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7. Professional trade management
What if I hadnt done.? or If I hadnt done X, then I would be a profitable trader by now are common questions and phrases thrown around by traders. Often, traders are much closer to becoming profitable than they realize. Edgewonk is aware of the what-if problem and the analytics evaluate specifically where you are losing money and what is causing you to lose.

How? The trade management analytics show you your potential and your actual performance. But even more important, you can analyze individual setups and strategies to find out where you are losing the most money and when to change your approach.
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8. Early warnings to avoid shortfalls
Although a trading journal usually only analyzes your past trades and performance, the Edgewonk features provide early warning signals that can keep you from making mistakes and losing money. Furthermore, the emotions analytics help you build a professional trading mindset.

How? The Tilt-meter analyzes your trading behavior, how well you respect your rules and how disciplined you are. When a trader repeatedly makes mistakes that cost money and shows an unprofessional trading mindset, the Tilt-meter rises and visually indicates that something is wrong and that a trader has to regroup.
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Conclusion: Many ways lead to profitable trading
Traders believe that all their problems only come from a bad entry strategy or that their indicators are not working. However, professional traders know that consistently winning is about much more than that and that there are multiple ways of tweaking and improving trading performance. The Edgewonk trading journal is designed and built to provide specific and easy to follow tips that are personalized to a traders own trading performance and behavior. The Edgewonk trading journal is like your personal and professional trading mentor available around the clock.

You can find many more articles and videos on how to increase your performance in our blog, and in our Youtube channel. Enjoy!

Trade well,
Moritz

As traders we are our own worst enemies. Even worse, most people don't even know or accept this fact because our mind is the great trickster. If you want to become a better trader you have to keep your mind controlled. See below what our journal does to help you do just that.

Overcoming Psychological Biases With The Edgewonk Trading Journal

Emotions and psychology play an important role and are often the cause for trading failure. The Edgewonk Pro trading journal includes a set of unique features and metrics that not only analyze the impacts of psychological biases, but also shows you exactly how to overcome these problems. In the following article we introduce the 4 most commonly observed psychological biases among traders and how Edgewonk helps you with overcoming these obstacles.

 

1. Loss aversion and disposition effect

These two biases are common mistakes that cost traders a lot of money and often their whole trading career. Traders tend to delay the realization of losses in the hope that trades could turn around and still become a winner. Usually, these trades result in large losses, way beyond the original plan. The disposition effect describes the phenomenon that traders sell winners early to realize the profit, while not cutting losing trades.

Overcoming loss aversion and the disposition effect
The Edgewonk trading journal analyzes your trading behavior in detail. Whether you are regularly widening your stop loss orders to let losers run or close your winning trades too early, Edgewonk will show you the negative impacts on your trading performance so that you can see how to improve your trading.

 

1. Self-attribution bias

This bias describes the effect that traders attribute successful outcomes to their own abilities and blaming external factors for their losses. The self-attribution also results in overconfidence during winning streaks and careless trading in losing streaks.

How to overcome the self-attribution bias
To overcome this bias, an objective perspective and a neutral performance evaluation is necessary. The built-in Tiltmeter and emotions analytics also prevent you from screwing up in a losing streak. Whenever you repeatedly make bad trading decisions, your Edgewonk trading journal warns you immediately.

 

1. Outcome bias

The Outcome bias describes the fact that traders judge a decision based on the outcome, rather than how the decision was made. If traders win a lot of money by risking their whole account on a single trade, it does not mean that it was a good thing to do. The end does not justify the means.

Overcoming outcome bias
Not all losing trades are bad and not all winning trades are good. Edgewonk uses the unique comment and tag function that allows you to assign individual comments to your trades. Our customers report that they use comments such as:

Positive comments: Good entry, stuck to the plan, did not break my rules, good exit, etc.
Negative comments: Entered too early, entered too late, exited too early, broke my rules, trade not in trading plan, etc.

Afterwards you can analyze the impacts of your trading decisions (based on your comments) and see how negative or positive trading decisions impact your trading performance.

 

1. Hindsight bias and regret

Hindsight bias is common and also a very painful bias for traders who look back on their closed trades (or missed opportunities) and then, with the benefit of hindsight, see what they should have done and where they missed out.

"If you convince yourself that you saw the market move in advance and you see that you didnt participate in the move, the dissonance between what your profitability should be and what it is leaves plenty of room for self-recrimination. Out of this regret, traders often feel pressure to make up for the missed opportunity, leading to overtrading." - Dr. Brett Steenbarger

Overcoming hindsight bias
To overcome hindsight bias, a look at your Edgewonk potential performance can help you soothe your nerves. When your potential performance and your actual performance are close together, there is nothing to worry about. If simultaneously your Edgewonk journal reports that you havent broken your rules or made bad trading decisions, keep calm and keep on trading. When your potential performance is much higher than your current performance, check the other Edgewonk statistics for clues how to improve your trading.

 

1. Conclusion: Quantifying emotional impacts to overcome biases

Edgewonk is built from traders, for traders. We zeroed in on the common problems that cost traders the most money and which are the cause for trading failure, developed ways to analyze and quantify the impacts and then built metrics and functions that allow you to overcome psychological obstacles and biases.

Hello Traders!

Today we released the first update to our Edgewonk Pro trading journal. Below is the list of the new features and improvements.

Support Of Additional Markets
Edgewonk now offers dedicated versions for CFD trading and Spreadbetting, in addition to Forex, Futures and Stocks trading journals.

Position Sizing Analytics
You can now filter your trades by position size. The new filter is available on all Edgewonk analytic sheets and with it you can explore the impact of different position sizes on your trading performance.

Custom Statistics
Every trader is slightly different and everyone has other needs when it comes to journaling trades. Thats why we are now introducing Custom Stats to Edgewonk. With these you can create any statistic and filter-method that you want, track your trades and then analyze your own custom statistics and tags. You need some inspiration of what to track? No problem:

1. Different trading sessions (European, Asian, New York, )
2. Timeframes
3. Indicator values
4. Big Round Numbers / S&R Levels
5. ...

Hold Time
Assign entry and exit times to your trade and analyze the effect of hold times on your performance. We added a whole new module that enables you to interactively analyze different hold times and how it affects other performance parameters of your strategy.



Scaling In/Out
We made using the scaling in/out function much easier for you. Just select that you scaled in or out from the new column and Edgewonk will copy the relevant trade data for you, making the process more intuitive. Furthermore, there is now a custom filter called Scaling in/out which lets you analyze how your partial entries and exits perform.



Improvements Of Alternative Strategies
We made tracking and analyzing alternative strategies easier and more efficient. After the update its possible to track not only the winrate but also the accompanying performance of your alternative strategies and compare it directly to your current strategy performance.

Increased The Limits
Before the update you could track up to 45 different instruments (stocks, forex pairs or futures) and 10 different strategies and setups. After the update, you can now track 300 different instruments and up to 50 different trading strategies and setups.

Terminal
We added a Terminal that allows you to easily navigate around the Edgewonk trading journal. Get an immediate overview of all different analytic features and make journaling more efficient.



New Emotions To Track
There are two new emotions available for tracking and analyzing: confidence and uncertainty, making the emotions analytics more efficient and helpful.

Winner / Loser Filter
Filter all your trades by losing and winning trades to find similarities between losses, to avoid them, and between your winning trades, to make more of them. The win/loss filter is available on all analytics sheets.

All Filters Added To Trade Management
All filters are now also available on the trade management sheet.

Handling Improvements
The Edgewonk trading journal now includes warnings when you enter data in a wrong way to avoid mistakes. Furthermore, throughout the whole trading journal, we added comments that immediately explain the functions and what to enter. Finally, Edgewonk now comes with expandable journaling functions which allow you to hide optional stats you might not use.





Algorithm Improvements And Bugfixes
We improved a few algorithms and our coding for a faster and more stable execution. Additionally, we fixed a few minor bugs.
You havent tried Edgewonk yet? You can get your free trial now and see how it can help your trading and see why our customers, trading professionals and novice traders, love Edgewonk. If you have any further questions, just send us an email!

Interested? Get your free trial now and see how Edgewonk can help you become a better trader.

Enjoy your weekend and have a great start to the new trading week!

Bests,
Moritz

Hi traders,

after our first month in business we received a few reviews. Read them yourself to be convinced by the quality of Edgewonk.

 

1. Steve Burns NewTraderU.com

Steve Burns has been investing in the stock market successfully for over 20 years and has been an active trader for over 14 years. See what he has to say about Edgewonk:

This tool is the most thorough trading journal I have ever seen. It allows a trader to log their trades, track their results, and learn from them. The journal allows a trader to track their emotions on entry and exit, and better understand their trading motivations. The tool provides a concise way to analyze the performance of set ups, stop loss placement, and improve profit taking.

In my book New Trader, Rich Trader I wrote A trading journal is like a teacher who teaches traders about themselves. I believe the Edgewonk tool is that kind of trading journal. It has exceeded my expectations as a way for traders to learn more about their trading habits, track and analyze their positions, and become better traders.

 

1. Edgewonk has been mentioned on Dr. Brett Steenbargers Traderfeed blog. Dr. Steenbarger is a trading author, trading psychology coach and a trader himself:

The Edgewonk electronic journal is integrated into Excel and integrates your trading observations (mood/psychology; thoughts about markets) with your P/L. The journal also tracks performance metrics, so that you can see where your trading has been strongest and weakest. Over time, this could form a great database for learning and performance improvement. Quoted from Dr. Steenbargers article

 

1. Forexalchemy, a leading Forex website, about our Edgewonk trading journal:

Edgewonk is the answer to figuring out how to make money, knowing youll only be right on some of the trades, and provides a proper blueprint on how to deal with the losers.

You will be hard pressed to find another Trading Journal packed with this many bells and whistles as Edgewonk. The entire Forex Alchemy team agrees, this truly is a must-have for every serious trader and deserving of a 5-star rating.

Read the full review on the Forexalchemy website.

If you haven't done so yet, check out our free trial here!

Have a great weekend,
Moritz

Track Only What Matters

Its not enough to simply measure things you have to measure what matters Waren Buffett as quoted by Tim Ferriss.
Trading is so complex that one could get lost only by thinking about all the variables affecting the markets and ones performance.

There are even people trying to track astrological constellations as cause and effect of trading behaviour. Seriously though, you dont have to go that far (although you could with Edgewonks custom statistics function).

So what is a good metric about?


1. It has to be causal, not correlated
In the Edgewonk trading jounral, everything we track is directly related to one stat: Your performance (account balance or %-return). For example, you might find out holding on to your losers longer than to your winners causes you to lose money over the long run because the disposition effect states that traders cannot cut losers and let winners run.

Now we could also track your weight. Lets say when you eat a lot of junk food you usually also perform much worse in the markets and gain weight.
So eating junk food causes two things to happen: Weight gain and performance loss. But gaining weight is not the cause of performance loss. Instead, they are correlated. Correlation means usually, when I gain weight, I perform worse. But you could also gain weight from putting on muscles.

So bodyweight is a misleading indicator when trying to nail down reasons for good or bad performance in the markets it does not make sense to track it.
Always track stats that undeniably cause your performance to improve or diminish.

2. It has to be actionable
What good is a metric if you cant change your behaviour because of it? To stick with the bodyweight example: If you track your weight, and its going up what are you going to do about it? You dont know because you are not tracking the causes. Tracking your ice cream intake in the same period and comparing it to another period to derive meaningful matters.

The same is true in trading do you really need a trading journal that only tells you that you are losing money, but not why you are losing money? We doubt it.
Additionally, if you can only trade during a certain session because of your job does it make sense to backtest and track records of a different session? No. Track things that you can change.

3. It has to be easily understandable
Crunching numbers should be easy. You have to see at one glance what they tell you. If every time you look at your metric you first have to think about its implications, there is definitely an easier way to measure what you want to measure. Think about Occams Razor.

You also may want to discuss your results with other people if so, you shouldnt have to explain your metrics because they should be self-explaining.

4. It has to be convertible to a ratio
You could track the value of the stochastic oscillator when you enter your trade and then try to find a relation between your winrate and said number. But absolute numbers on this stat wont bring you far. You will end up with 100 different numbers that have zero value.

Instead you could make simply track Stochastic above 50 and Stochastic below 50. This way you would get a very simple metric that would suddenly become comparable and most importantly, interpretable.

Conclusion: Make The Most Of Your Effort By Tracking The Right Things
Perfectionism rarely pays off; blind perfectionism never pays off. In a business like trading which depends on thousands of variables, it is easy to get caught up in a slaughterhouse of numbers. You wont be progressing that way. Track what matters.

Thats what Edgewonk does. Every single metric is designed for you to take action upon and improve your performance.

Hello traders,

ever wanted to use a professional trading journal but didn't find the right one because the stats you wanted to track were not in it? Every trader is different, every strategy is unique - thus everyone has different stats to track. With Edgewonk, you can now track whatever you want, fully customized to your own strategy. Take a look!

Meet The New And Powerful Custom Statistics Of Edgewonk

The new custom statistics eliminate all limitations and restrictions when it comes to tracking personalized data in your trading journal. They allow you to analyze your trading like never before.

The updated Edgewonk journal now comes with 6 custom statistics with 10 comments each, which allows you to create up to 60 different, fully personalized tags. According to feedback from our customers, these are the most commonly used custom statistics that different traders track:

1. Timeframes (Daily, 4H, 1H, 30min, 15min, 5 min)
2. Trading sessions (Asian, Frankfurt, London, New York)
3. Market data (VIX, sentiment, market index developments, )
4. News releases (GDP, earnings, NFP, CPI, interest rate decisions, press conferences, )
5. Indicator settings (values or standings of indicators, divergences, overbought/oversold, )

The possibilities are endless
http://www.edgewonk.com/wp-content/u...statistics.png

But more importantly, you can analyze the performance impact of each custom stat. All custom statistics are available as individual filters throughout the analytics sheets of the Edgewonk trading journal.

The following video walks you through the use of the custom statistics and shows you the possibilities of this unique feature.

Trade well!
Moritz

Get To Know Your Trading Inside Out With Edgewonk!

It's simple, really: A big factor of success in trading is confidence. Confidence comes with meaningful repetition and knowledge. Edgewonk helps you improve and speed up the process. Once you know your numbers, your whole mentality changes. Don't get left behind.



Bests & trade well,
Moritz

Practice, Skills And Performance How To Improve As A Trader

To become better at anything, you need to practice and develop your skills over a long time with consistency. Soccer players can work on their physical skills and their ball handling skills, musicians can rehearse their plays and chess players can analyze the best plays. In trading, the skills are not as obvious and your practicing possibilities are limited. However, there are multiple ways how a trader can become better and improve his skills.

Practice, expert performance and trading
But first, lets review what the research about practice and expert performance discovered and how trading fits in. The 5 following discoveries and statements have been extracted from the journal The Influence of Experience and Deliberate Practice on the Development of Superior Expert Performance by K. Anders Ericsson and we explain what they mean for traders.

1) Practice is designed to improve specific aspects of performance in a manner that assures that attained changes can be successfully measured.
In trading: Becoming better and improving some areas of your trading due to practice has to have a measurable effect on ones performance. Without tracking performance, in whatever field and profession, it is not possible toquantify the effect practice has, or whether it has any effect at all.

2) The principal challenge to attaining expert level performance is to induce stable specific changes that allow the performance to be incrementally improved.
In trading: You do not have to go from 0 to 100. The key to long-term success is consistent and steady short-term improvements. Furthermore, goals that seem too big at first glance can have an intimidating and paralyzing effect.

3) Once we conceive of expert performance as mediated by complex integrated systems of representations for the planning, analysis, execution, and monitoring of performance, it becomes clear that its acquisition requires a systematic and deliberate approach.
In trading: How do you approach your trading? As we will see throughout this article, a structured and analytical approach is the most effective way to improve as a trader. Every day, write your trading plan, follow the same routine, analyze your trades after they happened and enter them in your journal. Consistency, effort and attention to detail are key attributes to effective practice.

4) In their research on sports, Deakin and Cobley (2003) found that ice skaters spend a considerable portion of their limited practice time on jump-combinations they have already mastered, rather than working on the yet-to-be-mastered combinations, where there is the largest room for improvement.
In trading: Dont try to reinvent the wheel. Focus on what you are already good at and improve in this field. If you are a decent technician, do not suddenly start to learn about fundamental analysis. Stick to one approach, learn and master the basics before exploring other fields.

5) The effects of mere experience differ greatly from those of deliberate practice where individuals concentrate on actively trying to go beyond their current abilities.
In trading: Just staring at your charts and acquiring screentime will only have a limited effect. Follow a structured and analytical approach that will have a measurable effect, rather than aimlessly flipping through trading instruments or timeframes hunting for entry-signals.


Trading skills and becoming a better trader
To improve as a trader, you should work on your skills and attributes and focus on spending your energy where it will have a positive effect on your trading. The following attributes and skills are necessary for a trader to develop.

Discipline
Discipline in trading encompasses a variety of different aspects. First, you have to be disciplined to follow your rules. Premature and impulsive decisions where a trader violates his trading rules are a very big performance killer. Second, you need the discipline to regularly write a trading plan for the upcoming trading days and also be disciplined enough to journal all your trades afterwards.

Patience
Knowing when not to trade is often more important, especially for new traders. This coincides with the previously mentioned aspect of discipline.

Focus
How does your trading day look like? Do you randomly flip through timeframes and various instruments, hunting for entry-signals while watching TV, browsing through the web and chatting with other people? Trading is a performance activity and you cannot expect to outperform the market while treating trading as a sideline. While trading, do nothing else! Focus exclusively on your charts and your routine.

Independence
If you are looking for other peoples opinions to justify trade decisions, long-term success in trading is a long way away. It is important that traders make their decisions self-determined and independently. Your trading system should provide the framework for all trading decisions and you have to follow it religiously.

Planning
We touched it briefly and we mention it again. Planning your trades ahead of time is important. A trader needs to develop the discipline to write a structured trading plan BEFORE the markets open. If you arrive at your trading computer unprepared, clueless of what to expect, you havent done the necessary work.

Record keeping
Together with a trading plan, a trading journal is the #1 tool when it comes to developing trading skills. If you do not track what you have done, it is impossible to know what to change to become better. Keeping a trading journal requires effort and discipline, but this is what developing skills and practicing is all about.

Analytical skills
Analytical skills help a trader to process data and information quickly and efficiently. Whether you are a technical trader and specialize in pattern trading or are a fundamental trader who analyzes company and economic data, you are usually dealing with recurring patterns. The better you know your material, the less time and effort is required. And finally you can make trading decisions faster and more efficiently without consciously thinking about it all the time.

Honesty and responsibility
This brings us to the last and most overlooked attribute. Amateurs and consistently losing traders are delusional up to the point that they attribute their repeated failures to market inefficiencies or unfair and unforeseeable circumstances. They do not see that their own actions and decisions are causing them to lose money.
Tracking your trades and performance in a trading journal removes all subjectivity and confronts you with hard facts. Only if a trader acts fully disillusioned and accepts complete responsibility for all his results, he can develop and improve his skills.


Conclusion: Plan your trading success
Becoming a profitable trader is not an accidental product it requires time, effort and obeying certain principles. In any profession and field, developing skills requires deliberate practice and trading is no different. The Edgewonk trading journal takes out the guesswork, presents only hard facts and shows you exactly if your approach is working or not. But even more important, with the customization features, it shows you specifically and exactly where you are losing money and why. A trading journal is the tool that helps traders to build a professional set of skills by following a structured approach.