My resolution for 2008:  Continue to develop trading systems and trading plans.  Always strive to improve the systems and plan.  FOLLOW THE SYSTEM.  Of course, the key to following the system is to focus on returns over a longer period of time, rather than obsessing on the results of every trade, or “getting even” from a previous losing trade.

We had a death in the family this week that was more stressful than I expected.  As such, I discovered that the stress of trading and the stress of the family situation was too much for me to handle.  I shut down the system prematurely on Wednesday night, and while I did have a profitable week, I missed out on having an even bigger gain.  Maybe I’m being too hard on myself, but in the future, I expect that I should be able to handle the day to day stresses of trading even when other things are going on…after all, this is supposed to be one of the benefits of using an automated system.

At any rate, I’m done trading for the year and I expect to post my final numbers tomorrow.  I believe that this has been my best month ever in terms of absolute dollars and percentage returns, but I don’t have my results spreadsheets with me here.