Jigsaw Trading Blog

Feature in Focus - Profit Seeker

Written by Fernando | Jan 4, 2023 10:49:15 AM

 

When you are trading, have you ever had a "déjà vu" sensation? That feeling that you already lived that same situation before, especially during or after a losing trade, but you just can't place it when it happened? Frustrating, isn't it?

This is where Profit Seeker comes in. When creating your own Trade Types (trading setups) and specific Hashtags, you will be able to create statistics that will allow you to discover patterns you never thought possible, but also track your trades as no other platform does.

You will know which Trade Types are giving you more profits, you will know what trades you are having trouble with, #fomo, #momentum, #hope, and what time of day you are more active but not necessarily more profitable. What day of the week are you trading more long positions than short positions, and much more.

With all the statistics Profit Seeker is able to give you, you will finally track your "déjà vu" trades.

 

 

Notes:

Today we will be taking a look at the Profit Seeker. With this tool, you will be able to slice and dice your trading results in ways you never thought possible. Go through your trade history to find anomalies, for example, do you know which day of the week your performance is stronger? Which time of the day, your performance is weaker? Are you trading more shorts or longs? Are you prone to trade more breakouts or pullbacks? With all this knowledge and much more, you can fine-tune your trading, taking it to the next level, so you can do more of what works and less of what doesn’t.

And let’s start right off with our first example, we have a nice upwards running PnL, we can see that daily performance has been positive, with Mondays showing the best performance of the week and Fridays the weakest. We can also see that 4 pm has the worst performance, so let's take a closer look. We click on it, we can see the running PnL of that time period with a drawdown of $3K, and let’s now look at the trades done during this period, by opening the trade list. We can see the culprit here, a $3K loser. Looking at the hashtags this trader wrote, the trade started as a scalp, there was momentum at that time, which means… the market was moving fast, the trader hesitated, meaning… he thought of closing the trade, but obviously that did not happen, and it became a hope trade, the trader simply started to hope that the trade would come back to him, and the longer he waited, the further prices moved away from him. Notice how a trade that started as a scalp, in the end, the trader spent 38 min in it. He waited, and waited until he could not take it anymore and took the loss.

Let’s reset the filters.

Something we can also analyze, is the longs' performance… we have a nice upward-running PnL, we have a bit of a drawdown here, and Tuesdays, are not a good day to trade long positions. 

Let’s now look at the shorts' performance… also with an upward running PnL but showing some draw-downs, and in terms of the day of the week, Fridays, are also not a good day to trade short positions. We can also analyze more closely these draw-downs, by selecting that period on the chart itself, as you can see.  And let’s select the 9 am and the 2 pm time periods, which are showing the worst performance, so we can better analyze the combined drawdown of both periods.

Let’s reset the filters again and let’s move down, where we can also analyze the trades by account, symbol… by time in trade, but also by trade type and hashtags which we can set at the time we are creating the trades journal.

The 2 biggest trade types this trader has traded, are scalps and ranges. Let’s analyze them more closely. Looking at the scalps first, we can see an upward-running PnL, and that big drawdown, coming from that $3K trade we’ve looked at before. Looking now at the range type, the running PnL is a bit different. We had an initial drawdown and slowly this trader has been trading ranges more accurately.

Looking now at the hashtags' performance, remember that hope trade that the trader used, we can see that 7% of all trades have been hoping trades, of which 9% have been winning trades and a whopping 23% have been losing trades. Looking at them more closely, we can see how these trades have been hurting this trader, and if we look at the hashtags pairs, we can see that momentum trades, where markets are moving fast, are one of the problems this trader is facing. He is hesitating and when the market run from him, he seems to freeze, not wanting to take the loss and starting to hope prices come back to him. We saw that 9% of the hoped trades do generate a profit, but the losses he is taking… sooner or later, will kill his account.

This trader needs to better plan his trades, need to have a set of rules when trading fast markets, or just stay away altogether. He cannot hesitate taking a loss. He needs to stop hoping prices come back to him and get out of the position as soon as possible.

Another tool Profit Seeker has, is a statistical table, so you can easily analyze some of the most common statistics traders like to look at. Remember, all statistical data we show is based on the calendar period you selected here.

So we can see this trader's maximum gain and drawdown, his average win and loss trade, and also his largest win and loss trade, which clearly shows a problem. We can also see how many winners, losers, and scratch trades he traded.

Below we can also see his percentage winning and losing trades, his profit factor, the average MAE and MFE, the average hold time per trade, and when applied, also the several commissions paid.

Let’s now look at another example, where we have a trader with a big drawdown of $11K. 

Something we can do here is to create a set of rules to see if we can limit this trader drawdown, we could for example stop trading after a couple of losing trades. 

Let’s say the trader stopped trading after 8 consecutive losing trades, we can see that his drawdown would diminish to only $8K. And if he had stopped trading after 4 consecutive losing trades…, now his drawdown would have been only $2K, and his profit would be at $9K instead of only $681. 

This is the power of the Profit Seeker. It’s a fully interactive tool, and I guarantee you, you will spend fun hours analyzing your trades and finding patterns in them, you never imagined.