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Entry Month

Look for seasonality in your trading behaviour based on the month you entered trades

Ann Hunt avatar
Written by Ann Hunt
Updated over 4 years ago

This edge shows the differences in your behaviour in different months of the year. It is particularly insightful when you have traded for several years.

To analyse your trading during different months, you can follow a simple three-step analysis:

  • Review how much you traded each month and what it cost you

  • Determine which months are relevant

  • Identify strategies to improve your performance

 

1. What was I doing and what did it cost me?

To learn from your months edge, start by reviewing how much you traded each month, and how much you made or lost.

The trades chart shows the proportion of your trades entered during each month.

Looking at the total P&L chart shows that this trader lost most money in June. 

Markets are seasonal, as is your own calendar. Make sure to be aware of better or worse months to trade.
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2. Is it relevant?

Move on to the average P&L chart to identify whether trading during different months produces significantly different returns.

For this trader, June trades show the most significant negative performance.

A purple bar means that the returns on these trades are better than your average performance.

An orange bar means that the returns on these trades are worse than your average performance.

A grey bar shows you the average performance during different months, but it is informational only as there is no reliable trading pattern detected. 

Spend some quality time when you are not trading identifying why you do better during particular months. Follow our steps below with a view to developing your own hypothesis about why you may have a weakness or a strength on certain months of the year.
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3. What can I do to improve?

To identify a strategy for improvement, review your win rate, risk:reward and disposition on trades entered during different months. This will help you determine whether you're not winning often enough or whether your winners are too small. 

First, check if the win rate during different months is normal for you. If the win rate is lower than your overall average, this suggests that your trade selection needs improvement. 

In this example, the win rate on the trader's June trades is considerably lower than his overall win rate (indicated by the dotted line).

If your win rate is similar of better, look to risk:reward. If the risk:reward is lower for trades during a particular month, then your planned entry and exit points are not meeting your normal targets.

In this example, the trader's risk:reward on his June trades is considerably lower than his overall risk:reward (indicated by the dotted line), suggesting that his winning trades are not big enough to cover his losing trades. 

Finally, look at your disposition for trades entered during different months. Disposition is the ratio of the time you spend in winning trades relative to the time you spend in losing trades.

If your disposition is lower than your average or is less than 1, then you are letting losers run too long, or cutting winners too quickly. You can’t hit the right risk:reward ratio if your disposition doesn’t show a similar value.

In this example, the trader's disposition on his June trades is lower than his overall disposition (indicated by the dotted line), suggesting that he spends disproportionately longer in losing trades compared to winning trades.

Now that you have analysed your metrics, develop your own personal hypothesis about why you may have a weakness trading during particular months. Once you have identified your area of weakness, introduce change in your trading to compensate and improve. Start small, the key is to be able to change your behaviour around trading.

With GamePlan, you are taking the “guessing” away, and making change based on statistically reliable habits from your past trading.

Finally, measure the results. For example, if you execute 30 trades in this category in 1 month, then use the calendar filter set to “1M” to measure your new performance. Make sure you allow enough time and enough trades for a realistic experiment. 

Remember to only work on a single edge at a time. GamePlan generates many different edges for improvement. Choose the one that you feel will be easiest to implement and can give you the best improvement in your trading. All change takes time. Give any new change a minimum of 3 weeks and 30 trades to start seeing results.

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