Friday Notes - An Imperfect Month

4:00pm Let it be said that I probably made more mistakes this month than I've made in a long while. And if you scan back through many of the January blog entries, you'll see that while I began the month with some mental R&R (trading each day, but lightly), I haven't been satisfied with recent results.

My early morning performance -- traditionally a strength of mine over the years -- has generally been poor and has often resulted in my needing to make more midday adjustments on the fly than I'd like. Too many. And such was the case again this morning when I was just enough out-of-sync to suboptimize the classic morning-after-trend oscillations, although I again did OK with the midday short sequences to more than offset the early sloppiness. Trade sequences have also been sloppier than I'd like as I continue to work on re-establishing a consistent, non-hesitant, crisp trade execution flow.

And yet, as we peek at the chip score for the first time this year, I'm still awaiting my first daily chip loss of the year. 21 trading sessions, 21 chip gains. 23 overall in a row. I almost wish it weren't true, as the P&L on the other hand leaves a lot to be desired. If stacked against the '08 months, it would rank a mere 10th of 12, although certainly a decent improvement over December where I essentially locked up the year mid-month, and not that far off from January '08. And I'm traditionally a slow starter.

Yet this is why I hate statistics and pay little attention to them. As I've said ad infinitum, I care about one number: Net Profit. 21/21 means nothing, aside from a general view of consistency -- including possibly consistently mediocre. And while those new to the blog continue to try to calculate and make sense of all sorts of stats such as win/loss %, average points per trade, etc., I'll go on record once again saying such analysis in my view is a highly irrelevant after-the-fact statistic.

I also don't care for Rate of Return analyses, despite last year's benchmarking effort which was more for fun than anything. I'm a bottom line guy, period. Plus, too many games can be played with RORs in terms of moving balances around, purposely and effectively trading only a portion of tradable capital for risk control, or growing tiny amounts of capital with extreme high-risk leverage. It's simply not important to me, and I'd take $1M annually with a declining ROR every year in a heartbeat.

Yet we'll take one final and brief look at January, before forgetting it as soon as the virtual words are typed:

January 2009
Daily Gains: $119,259
Daily Losses: $0
Commissions: -$17,084
Overheads: -$3,271
Net Profit: $98,904
Daily Win/Loss %: 100%
Contracts Traded: 34,788
Pace:
- Projected 2009 annualized: $1,186,848 (Careful with this; it's annualization of only one month.)
- Last three months annualized: $1,448,396
- Last twelve months actual: $1,630,942

My only comment about the pace figures is I don't like the declining #s from largest timeframe (12 mos) to the most immediate timeframe (1 mo), although Dec & Jan include an intentional slowdown so I can't make too much of it. Still, I'd rather see the three figures trend the other way.

Now, it's history and forgotten. The foundation for the rest of the year is now set, and it's time to build the house.

And I have to decide whether I'm truly going to get serious about the '09 trade. I've said I'm now ready. I've said I'm now well-rested. I've said last year is now fully and completely behind me and forgotten.

But as always, talk is cheap. I'm going to have to prove it again. Not to anyone looking over my shoulder ... just to myself. I'm my toughest critic and it will always be that way.

It was a very imperfect month and I have a lot of work ahead of me.

It's time for less talk and more action.

The wall studs go up on Monday.

We'll "chat" more over the weekend.