After deciding to shut it down in mid-November and taking December completely off day trading; I started the year off with almost exactly $3,000 in my day trading account at my broker Capital Markets Elite Group aka CMEG.
My long term goal, as is the case with most traders who only have a small amount to start out with, is to get my account up to $30,000 and therefore over the pattern day trader (PDT) rule hurdle. To this end, my first major milestone was getting my account from $3,000 to $5,000 which would allow me to feel comfortable sizing up from $50 risk per trade to $100 risk per trade. My targeted time frame for this was around 3 months or by the end of March.
Well I must say I am very pleased to announce that I very nearly accomplished this milestone in January alone! As you can see below; I grossed just over $1,800 before commissions and fees or roughly 60% growth on my small account in a single month!
I took a total of 52 trades with 52% being winners and 48% losers. This means January was also far and away my best month in terms of accuracy. During my last three profitable months (Sep, Oct, and Nov) last year; my accuracy languished in the mid to low 40's. Although I am happy with my accuracy in January; I know I can improve it even further and will look to target at least 60% accuracy for the month of February.
What I am really proud of though is my average win to average loss ratio which stands at 2.69 for the month! If you know anything about day trading or trading in general you will know that this is extremely impressive; especially when you consider that I risk losing $50 on every trade and my average loser is almost $12 less! Further the fact that my average winner is more than two times my planned risk per trade also indicates that although I kept a tight rein on losers; I also allowed my winners room to run for the most part.
I don't plan to change anything much about my day trading process for the month of February except for trying to take high quality set-ups only and then sizing up to $100 per trade once I am able to take my account over $5,000.
One of my mid term goals is to start taking live trades in pre-market. However, before I will allow my self to start doing so I need to prove to my self that I can be consistently profitable trading the pre-market for at least a quarter or 3 months or so. While the results of my pre-market trading in January do look encouraging; I'll need to improve a lot more before I will risk my money in pre-market.
With pre-market trades included; my number of trades increase from 52 to 85 which is good when you have edge as it means you will make more money by default. This shows true below as my total gain increases from $1,832.97 to $2,194.44. However, $361.47 from an extra 33 trades is hardly impressive and not yet worthy of me risking my hard earned money and mental capital on pre-market trades.
As you can see above, when pre-market trades are included with my live trades; my average loser jumps by almost $10 and my accuracy falls by nearly 4 percentage points. Part of this has been due to me taking a few boredom trades while I wait an extra hour for the markets to open due to day light savings time. However, for the most, trades were taken from set-ups that I thought would work at the time. So for the month of February, my goal will be to get my pre-market trading results at least on par with my live trading results from January.
All in all, after commissions and fees, I netted $1,700.09 for the month of January. So after my broker withdraws the platform and data fees ($125), I will start the month of February with $4,575.31 and continue pushing to get past $5,000 then hopefully onto $10,000. Wish me luck!
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