ASX end of year trading review for 2021

#OPINIONLEADER#

Will be going through month by month with the key points in dot point form that I learnt, what I did well and what I didn't do so well. For this year are 11.2k net profits (74.8%), key take homes for me were risk management must be respected especially when entering later into a move and for now soft spots are out.

April:

First month of trading started off using small size as the start of the year was focused on learning strategies.

Needed to begin freeing up my schedule where I was taking on less work, eventually allowing me to full time trade into June.

A lot of this month was dedicated to getting more familiar with reading the tape and getting my head around the Spark platform.

Main point of concern was risk management with my losing trades allowed to run longer than my winning trades.

Identifying the stocks in play was an area that required more work and entry points needed to be kept in check as I had FOMO on trades which eroded any favorable risk to reward ratios.

May:

I narrowed down on the holding of winning trades longer if they will still valid positions and kept hard stops in place.

Consistency was a bit all over the place still as my grasp of reading the tape needed more work.

I really made an effort to not jump into moves late and if an entry was taken a little bit late I took the risk right down.

Chart analysis was an area I worked on to help have a plan before trading, including have a clear list of what if scenarios.

June:

This month saw me take the leap into full time trading and that meant more screen time, I was busy on the charts and traded quite a bit more.

Some bad habits emerged this month seeing me add to losing positions, realised how easy it was for me to go into tilt as my understanding of trading was clearly highlighted as limited still.

Soft stop losses made a feature this month and my discipline was thrown out the window as my sizing was taken up a notch with no real assessment as to my readiness for this.

July:

Better month compared to June where I sized down a bit and worked on trying to be more consistent.

Did trade quite a bit and commissions ate into my profits, was a good learning experience to always keep comms in the back of my mind when taking a trade.

Allowing my winning trades to run was still not being executed as planned, to be honest my sizing could of been lowered by at least a third to allow for less emotional trading.

August:

Kept trying to buy the dip on FMG until I eventually got burnt enough and went short and held for a couple of weeks.

This was a less is best approach type month with FMG down trending strongly, with the falling iron ore price.

The start of the month saw we take a nice dip into draw down, all until I stepped back and went to the higher time frames to see that this was a not a buy and went short.

September:

A trending market meant I was trading less although still got caught up in the noise when FMG was range bound before making a break higher.

I stayed patient when in a winning position and had a good read on the flow of the market.

Did still lack some planning with the stop loss positioning later in the month and discipline with that large losing trade.

October:

This was a choppy month with a lack of discipline as I was stuck chasing moves that lacked decent follow through.

Sizing based on the quality of the set up still needs work with the start of the month a mess of chasing and adding to losing positions.

I didn't consider commissions as I was trading quite a lot with higher size and this cost was not appreciated until after a proper end of month review.

November:

Best month of the year with markets in a strong bullish sentiment, I also ventured outside of FMG into small caps with better discipline on closing out losing positions.

Had clear plans for each trading day and sized accordingly to the quality of the set ups.

Did hold some positions overnight but not with reckless sizing and took profits with regard to what was going on in front of me and not what the PnL showed.

December:

Got into a poor state of mind later in the month after my largest loss of the year. Would be best in the future to focus on having the next day off and appreciating what went wrong to avoid these situations occurring.

Consistency during the first half of the month was pleasing but sizing and respecting stop losses must be adhered to.

When in a losing position I'm very easy to lose track of the overall move in get stuck in the lower time frame losing context of what's really happening. Also must not re enter in the same direction when the move is clearly against the flow causing more damage.