Monday, December 29, 2008

Special Post - 2008 Day of Week Stats

Have I said I hate Mondays??

Take a look at the attached P&L chart by day of week (click to enlarge).

Yup, that's a net loss for the year on Mondays, which as I alluded to in today's earlier post, frankly isn't a surprise. Even adjusting for the single-day $94K loss that's buried in the Monday figure, it would still be dwarfed by the other four days. (btw, the largest day 9/18 gain is buried in the Thursday figure). Talk about needing to get your motor running!

Note: The total of all bars is slightly less than the true profit before overheads, as early in the year the CME booked member commission rebates monthly (vs. daily) which I didn't at that time allocate to day of week. The general trend is the main concept here.

Seriously though, it's again not much of a surprise as I've found that it often takes some time after the weekend break for both the market and this trader to establish their respective rhythms for the week before the cheek-to-cheek dance can begin in earnest.

The % of profitable days by day-of-week also tells a similar story:

Mon 65%
Tue 77%
Wed 78%
Thu 89%
Fri 85%

Again, not a shocker as the week's dance often builds to a crescendo on Thursday before settling down a bit on Friday. Yet before we consider printing the "Work One Day a Week and Make $600K" book, I again stress the stats simply are what they are and it makes no sense to try to manage "to them". For after normalizing for the one large Monday loss, the day would still provide incremental income ... albeit at a lower rate than other days. And as with anything printed in this diary, the patterns also simply reflect the internal rhythms of this one trader.

Yet thankfully, today was the last Monday of 2008.

Wake me on Tuesday.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Unless you are incredily crazy about trading, you should just have 3 days long weekends and don't even trade on Mondays...
But you probably figured this much already...