# closed winning trades : 6

# closed losing trades : 6

Net monthly return on risk capital : 29.4%

 

Thinking about randomness seems to have invited it into my trading these past couple of weeks.  I should say that today was a great day to stay the hell out of the market’s way, being the Friday before a US holiday and the day of a Fed chairman’s speech that was dubbed as “the most important of his professional career”. 

There were a lot of unexpected events in my systems in the past two weeks.  I had two losing weeks in a row, but the total drawdown right now is less than 6%.

Let me recap it.  Firstly, in two week’s time, there have been two losing trades in my cash forex account where the trade was never triggered in the futures market, due to differences in the systems that I use.  This is pretty impressive, seeing as the parameters are nearly identical.  Secondly, there was a lot of whipsaw volatility in the account.  Last week, for example, the combined account drew down 20% in 2 days, only to recover nearly all of the loss by the end of the week.  Finally, this morning, I had an issue with Tradestation where a trade that would have been showing a profit was not entered.  Seeing that the trade was correctly entered by MetaTrader in my forex cash account, I foolishly doubled down my cash position instead of entering a futures position…the market immediately started to reverse, and sensing that I’ve been on this path before, and that I was emotionally “hot”, I closed the combined trade out in the cash market with a 6 pip profit.  The market continued lower, and I would have been stopped out for a loss on that trade. 

So, amazingly, nearly 100% of the profits that I booked this month were the result of discretionary action…all of this the result of prematurely closing the system down on two Fridays this month; once after the Fed’s surprise discount rate cut, and once before Mr. Bernanke’s speech on the last day of the month.  My risk capital return was also helped by taking some money off the table a couple of weeks ago.  Yeah, August is a great month for a vacation.  I’m considering a September vacation…I don’t want to get too cocky about my discretionary “skill”…I’ve gotten burned on that before.