See You in 2006

This is my last post for the year. I’ll be taking a couple of weeks off from both trading and blogging — I don’t want to see a computer for a while. Regular posting should resume around the second week of January.

Once again I’ll continue my tradition of not making any New Year’s resolutions (sorry Michael Taylor!) although I do have some goal setting to do for 2006 (and beyond). I’m going to spend some time analyzing my trading journal to find things that I need to improve upon. One thing that I already know is that I need to trade more. (And to think that I was concerned about over-trading when I switched to daytrading.) Some of the most glaring notes in my journal are about trades that I didn’t take. There are about 10 trades that I’ve noted that would have been huge winners that I didn’t even attempt.

The other thing that’s telling me I need to trade more is my expectancy. I’d like to make at least an average of 3R per day. Dividing my desired profit per day by my expectancy per trade tells me how many trades I should be averaging each day. So I either need to do a lot more trades or catch a few of those big R winners that I let pass me by this year.

I also know that I need to add some different strategies to my repertoire. There were too many choppy and/or low volatility days that kept me on the sidelines — especially in the late summer/early autumn period. So I’ll be doing some work to see if I can find some strategies to make money on those days… OK, I guess I’ll shut up now before I end up writing a book here.

I really appreciate that all of you keep coming back to the site. Hopefully it’ll continue to be useful in the future. I’ve also got some site changes to contemplate during the break, the biggest of which is a better way to do intraday updates. I think a chat room would be more effective (and easier for me!) than the current method. That would also keep me from feeling like I’m talking to myself. If anybody has ideas I’m open to suggestions.

I hope all of you have a Happy New Year! I’ll “see” you all in January.

P.S. My market prediction for 2006 is the same as my 2005 prediction!

P.P.S. For those of you who are new to the site take a look through the archives and/or the Subject Index. There’s also a ton of material in the links archive.