Scalping and Analysing your trades

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douwe

When trading I have approximately 8-10 trades a day. I write down every trade and when I close the position I make a jpg of the chart. after the market closes I will print the chart and write down Entry, initial Stop, Trailing stop etc for analysing purposes

But how do you analyse when scalping, you go in and out and I have read that some of them have more then 100 trades a day.

Do you analyse every trade, or only when you have a losing day, how do you keep track of your performance (exporting to MS Excel for example), etc. I would appreciate some feedback on this matter.

douwe
 
Quote from douwe:

When trading I have approximately 8-10 trades a day. I write down every trade and when I close the position I make a jpg of the chart. after the market closes I will print the chart and write down Entry, initial Stop, Trailing stop etc for analysing purposes

But how do you analyse when scalping, you go in and out and I have read that some of them have more then 100 trades a day.

Do you analyse every trade, or only when you have a losing day, how do you keep track of your performance (exporting to MS Excel for example), etc. I would appreciate some feedback on this matter.

douwe
More...

My experience is that if I'm trading more than 20x a day, I'm usually focused on one security and there's no time to analyze anything. It's all about momentum, finding a liquidity block, and/or making the spread. Either I guess right and win or I guess wrong and lose.
 
1/ do what works and makes sense for you
2/ what others do may not be right for you
3/ scalping tends to be based around market prints more than ta & charts.
4/ good trading & keep your discipline
 
I use to have an edge where I would trade up to 200 times in a day. It was easy because I used the same strategy over and over again. No analysis was necessary. Every time that I saw the trade, I took it.
 
Check and see if your trading platform has software to analyze your trades. TT's X-Trader has this feature. It can tell you things like your average time in a trade for both your winners and losers, and your average gain/loss, etc.

Cheers,

TRADERguy
 
For such few fills, you can just create a spreadsheet. I will try to post a recent analysis from the office tomorrow, so you can have an idea of what I look at for scalpers.

I would caution you against trying to scalp and analyze every trade at the same time. Scalping requires a flow and you can't have that if you are scrutinizing every trade rather than paying attention to the market.
 
You can work on your system by recording all included parameters of the market when you get into a position. Afterwards, depending on which way the market goes, you'll either have a confirmation or a contradiction of your hypothesis.

The format of the record follows from the type of measurements taken.
 
It sounds like you are still trying to figure out the scalping thing. You can seriously gain a lot from doing the following:
  1. Put up the tape for the product you trade. It will take a while to get accustomed to it, but it is very useful to know what the market is actually doing at the moment as opposed to seeing the bid/offers.
  2. I will post a copy of my standard lineout that I use for my traders. You will find that paying attention to your entries and hold time as well as how you are doing overall will be a useful tool.
  3. LISTEN to your inner thoughts while you trade. Is your pointer hesitating on the screen? What thought do you have when you get filled? Are you thinking "ok crap.... I need to take a tick quick" or are you sitting back and just watching how it goes calmly?
  4. Pay attention to your breath. Is there a big sigh of relief when you get out of a position?
  5. This may seem odd, but get a headset with a microphone. A good one from Logitech will cost you around $30. Set it up so that the microphone is right in front of your mouth. Buy and install Camtasia and record your trading screen in one or two hour increments (you need a good amount of memory and CPU power for this). Make sure you enable the AUDIO in Camtasia. When you play back the video, you want to listen for your breath (hence the microphone being right in front of your mouth and under your nose). Seems bizarre, but you might be surprised at what you will find.
  6. When you play back the video also watch for what the prints on the tape show versus what happens a few seconds or minutes later (depending on the speed of the prints coming in).
  7. Split your trading session into 2 and don't do your lineout/analysis until the end of each session. Write down what you learned from the lineout and apply it to the second session. Are you able to maintain your goal/discipline? If not, you need to work on your discipline. Scalping is the style where discipline matters most because of how quick you have to think and be.
  8. Send me a check for providing invaluable advice to you. Any amount is fine with me. :D
I hope you can make this happen. If I'm missing the point of your post, please let me know.
 
I don't know how locked in you are on a trading platform, but TradeMaven has an associate application called Performance Viewer. It maintains all kinds of statistics, automatically, and automatically maintains charts which are painted with all your entries. It's really pretty cool
 
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