Subscriber Letter Trade Results For February

So I finally got around to putting together the stats for February for the Subscriber Letter and have included them below. There are very few trades that were closed out in February. There were several active ones that didn’t get closed out until March. For simplicity I’ve always just reported the closed trades. I see no point in marking to market at the end of each month and running complex stats. Reason being this is NOT a performance report. No allocation sizes are suggested and the trade ideas are not presented as a portfolio, but rather a list of actionable ideas that I track. The February results were once again excellent. March got off to a rough start with a couple of individual trades. This week has been good but there’s a decent chance it may have the first negative total since last August. I’m getting ahead of myself, though. Below are some of the usual caveats followed by the February summary results.

As mentioned above, I don’t suggest position sizes. The primary reason for this is I’m not acting as a financial advisor. I don’t feel it is appropriate to suggest allocation sizes without understanding someone’s financial situation and risk tolerance. Even for my own trading I run different portfolios with different levels of aggressiveness. For instance, my most aggressive portfolio is my IRA. Here I may use options to sometimes get 400-500% leveraged. Other portfolios on the other hand normally take much more conservative stances and some rarely reach or exceed 100% exposure.

Since I don’t suggest position sizes this is should not be considered a performance report, but rather a trade idea scorecard. Therefore, no matter how objective I try to be the reporting of the results is always going to be skewed depending on how you approach the trades. For instance, I always recommend scaling into the Catapult positions in 3 parts, whereas the “System” trades (whatever system I unveil other than Catapult) are normally one entry. The “Index” trades I normally recommend scaling into as well. For my own trading I trade much larger size with the index trades than any of the individuals. I also control my exposure by limiting the total amount invested per day. As I mentioned, this will vary depending on the account I’m trading. My most aggressive account I may put in up to 100%/day and get heavily leveraged using options. A more conservative account may max out at 15%-20% per day.

It’s unlikely anyone would have taken all of the trades with equal amounts, so personal results would vary greatly depending on the trader’s approach. Simply adding up the results of the individual triggers as I do below is an admittedly poor representation of returns. A net positive or negative does not necessarily mean a person following the ideas would have made or lost money during the period measured. And the sum total is certainly not representative of what a portfolio would return. All that aside, below are February’s results (click to enlarge):



Detailed trade by trade results will appear in this weekend’s Subscriber Letter. If you haven’t checked out the gold membership area yet, then click here to sign up for a free trial (only a name and email address required). It’s not just trade ideas. It contains research far beyond the blog as well as members-only charts, systems (with code included), and custom indicators.