Trading as a hobby

June has become an extremely boring month, from a trading point of view. The account started a new period of drawdown early on in the month, and did not recover from it during the month. The drawdown actually became worse on the very last trading day. At the end of the month is the account 13% down compared to the beginning of the month. In total, the account value (relative nlv) now stands at 132% of the invested capital.
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Although the monthly results look very poor am I not losing trust in the system. The drawdown graph shows that I've been through similar periods before. It just happened that the previous high occurred at the start of the month, and the most recent low at the end of the month, making the monthly results look so poor.

Open positions at the end of June:
futures, long: ESTX50, M6E
futures, short: GE, V2TX
ETF stock, long: DIA, EEM, SPY, XLI, XLV

The remarkable thing of the month was the number of times my ETF trading system traded. In the preceding three months (March~May) were there 13 instances. Thus on average once per week. There have been 10 trades during June. Meaning more than twice per week on average. As my system looks for the "leading pack" of the ETFs to invest in, this implies that this "leading pack" has been changing a lot during this month. And that several ETFs, once in this "leading pack", could not keep up, fell behind, and were removed from the selection.
 
Hi, good to see your performance, do you withdraw capital from this account/portfolio at all ? If not, do you plan to in the future ?
 
July saw the continuation of the "doldrums" which started in early June. Nothing of interest happened in the first half of the month. Most of the instruments did not show any substantial movement, so the number of open positions was small. And the positions which were open had only a small size as the conviction was not high. Only the second half of the month saw some movement: the account value is creeping upwards and the drawdown is getting smaller.
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The relative account value at the end of the month stood at 146% of the total investments. The drawdown stood at -11%. The account was 6% higher at the end of July, compared to the beginning of the month.

Open positions at the end of July (IB symbol codes):
futures, long: M6E
futures, short: V2TX
ETF stock, long: DIA, EEM, EPI, SPY

The ETF system behaved in July similar to June: the number of times it traded was higher than the in the preceding months (it traded 9 times in July).
 
This month (August) seems to be a repeat of last month. My account was recovering from a drawdown. This recovery started mid July and continued until August 8th, when Trump felt it necessary to say something about North Korea. The jitters resulting from his comments sent my account back down again and the recovery had to start all over again. The net result is that the account value at the end of the month equals that of the beginning of the month.
The account's net liquidation value stands at 145% of the total invested amount (thus 45% profit since the start in October 2016). The current drawdown is 11%. No new high water mark has been reached. The latest high water mark was reached on June 3rd.
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My open positions are (IB symbol codes):
futures, long: GBM, GE, HG, M6E
futures, short: V2TX, ZC
ETFs, long: EEM, FXE, JJC, XLU

The recovery in the futures system has been going slowly. During the first three weeks of the month was the conviction rather low, so my system held small position sizes. Several instruments didn't even show a conviction good enough to open a position at all. Only during the last week have things become more "lively" and were some more positions opened. The jitters caused the V2TX position to be reduced substantially, due to increased contract value volatility.
My ETF system further reduced exposure to American equity. Only a position in XLU (utilities) remains.
 
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This journal is getting rather boring. September seems a repeat of August, which was a repeat of July, etc. Also during September did my account crawl upwards, reducing the drawdown, until something happened and the account dropped down again. Renewed tensions between N. Korea and the USA influenced this. Plus a rise and fall in the EUR/USD exchange rate, before and after the German election.
The graph shows the relative net liquidation value and the relative high water mark. At the end of the month was the account in a drawdown of 15%. The high water mark, which was reached in early June, has not been challenged in September either.
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Open positions at the end of September (IB symbol codes):
futures, long: ES, ESTX50, M6E,
futures, short: 3KTB, GE, V2TX, ZC
ETFs, long: DIA, EFA, EWJ, SPY, XLI,

I am now running this system for almost one year, and the account value increased by about 38%. Not a bad result, in my view. However, looking at the red graph, it seems that this good result is mainly due to two periods of solid increase: Nov~Dec 2016 and late-April 2017. So it is certainly not a steady upward-moving system. It is interesting to see how this system performs. And at the same time I need to resist the urge to "fiddle" with it during periods when no rise is present.
I ran a statistical analysis on the daily returns. Something I also did in May. Just as then, was the result now that the daily volatility is about 2%. So even though the account value curve looks very different until May and since May, the volatility has been identical and well-controlled by the system. Designing a system which controls account volatility was something I had not done previously, and this has truly been a good lesson for me this past year. The worst performing day and best performing day were in April and May, so the last couple of months do not show extreme behaviour or outliers.

My ETF system traded during many days of the month. More than I would like. I need to keep a close watch on this, to avoid that I spend too much on commission without having a real benefit from it.
 
Humpy said:
You must have great patience.
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I can think of two possible interpretations of your comment. Either (a) this kind of trading system requires a lot of patience, or (b), you are commending me for having great patience.
The trading system is based on a system developed by @globalarbtrader as described in his (first) book and of which he keeps a journal here at ET. From his historical results did I already know that this is something which you need to run long term in order to see the results. So I knew what was expected of me. Having said that, the very good results up to May made me (over)optimistic and the months since then have put my feet firmly back on earth again.
 
Humpy said:
I hobby trade but have to have some ( 3 or more ) positions ongoing or I get bored.
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As you can see from my journal do I have multiple open positions. And more instruments are being monitored. However, these are all controlled by software/automation. I don't place discretionary trades. I don't check charts but do monitor the log files which my software generates to see what is happening.
 
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