My month to date results for June 2007:

# closed winning trades : 5

# closed losing trades : 1

Total Net monthly profit % (risk capital + living expense buffer) : 48.2%

Net return on risk capital : 73.1%

I want to give a clearer picture on just how well this month has gone, but I’m struggling with a way to do that.  Basically, I want to report two performance figures.  The first one, Total Net Monthly Profit %, is the return expressed as a percentage of the sum of my risk capital and living expense buffer.  Because the living expense buffer is not at risk, but is rather consumed on a monthly basis, it smoothes out the return % figure.  The second metric, net return on risk capital, is the figure that is comparable to the returns that I reported for Cable Glider I, when I had a full time job to pay the bills and had no need for a living expense buffer in my trading account.  Anyway, my best month had been March 2007 with a return of 47.1%.  As of right now in June 2007, the Cable Glider II is up 73.1% on a comparable basis, and the original Cable Glider I system is within 2% of fully recovering from the drawdown it experienced in May 2007.

The Cable Glider had 3 wins and 0 losses this week.  We captured 130 pips between Monday and Wednesday on a single trade and squeezed out a couple of tiny winners on Friday morning as the pair advanced toward and then retreated from the $2 mark.   Everything has gone well so far this month, and now the system is idle until after next Thursday’s Fed decision on interest rates, so there’s only one more active trading day for the system this month. 

May was a terrible month.  I had an 11 trade losing streak and a gap of 33 calendar days between winning trades.  I stuck with the system because I didn’t see any evidence that it was broken, and if not for a spot of bad luck in addition, the losses from May would have been much milder.  I think that if I were a discretionary (manual) trader, I might have blown my account out.  A big losing streak can make a trader lose all common sense.  Committment to systematic trading and the lack of a better system to use allowed me to stick with it through the drawdown.