Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Trading stats!


I am sure you are excited to hear my stock trading stats to date. Since taking a more proactive role in the management of a portion of our retirement funds, we have:

5 months active trading
71 positions taken (most are closed)
18% total return on capital used
9% of that eaten by trading fees (Scottrade) - so half the money we "made" got taken by the brokerage.
Biggest loser: -28% after fees
Biggest winner: +79% after fees (on the same stock as above at a different time)
Average trade: + 2.31%
Longest duration held: 4.5 months
Shortest duration: intraday
Average position size: 6% of tradeable cash

Biggest lesson - use stop losses to limit losses and trailing stops to lock in gains while keeping some room for additional upside.

3 comments:

rob said...

switch to interactive brokers. $1 per trade.

www.interactivebrokers.com

MM said...

9% GTN in 5 mo's isn't exactly sucking, dood! Like Rob said, find a way to trim your transactions costs down, if you're running high volumes of trading, then there are prolly a bunch of options (pun) for you.

Are you on margin at all or just trading with the lunch money?

C

martygaal said...

Thanks Rob, I wil check it out.

MM, thanks, no margin at the moment.