Objectives - March 2010 - Review

In this post I will review my performance from the past month, determining what was accomplished, what was not accomplished and why.  Below is a summary of the objectives I set for myeslf during the month of March:

• Document daily study activities on blog (pages read, blogs read, trades, tasks, etc.)
• Update daily market breadth indicators spreadsheet
• Determine specific time period for backtesting that encompasses bear and bull market periods and also has little to no return for the buy-and-hold investor. Use SPY or IWM to determine backtest period. Summarize statistics for the period such as number of positive months, number of negative months, etc.
• Perform 1 backtest research study per week
• Read 25 pages per week - Option Volatility and Pricing
• Read 60 pages per week - Data Analysis with Excel
• Read 40 pages per week - VBA Power Programming
• Archive 100 blog posts per week
• Study Thinkorswim tutorials for Papermoney. Learn to place orders for entries and exits, as well as tracking performance.
• Create a trading journal to track trades and various metrics.

The items in green of the obejctives that I completed during the month.  The items in yellow are objectives that were partially completed during the month.  The items in red are objectives that were not completed during the month.  Below is the list of items that I accomplished in March:

• Read 1067 trading blog posts
• Read 88 pages  - Option Volatility and Pricing - Natenberg
• Read 133 pages - Excel 2007 Data Analysis for Dummies - Nelson
• Read 130 pages - Excel 2007 Power Programming with VBA - Walkenbach
• 53 hours of backtesting with StockFinder 4.0
• Monitored daily StockTwits feed for 13 days
• Monitored intraday SPY and IWM activity for 22 days
• Updated market breadth spreadsheet on 22 days
• Ran 25 miles
• 22.5 hours of martial arts

I did an excellent job of recording my daily progress on this blog.  Updating the blog on daily accomplishments has become part of my regular daily routine.  Also, I maintain a spreadsheet of market breadth indicators on a daily basis.  This action keeps me closely linked to the daily performance of the SPY and IWM.  The spreadsheet also allows me to try out new indicators, keeping the ones I like and disposing of the ones that are worthless.  I am also trying to make StockTwits part of my daily routine.  It is difficult sometimes because of various meetings I have throughout the day.  I need to login to the site everyday once I arrive at work to help ensure that it becomes part of my dialy routine.

Reading through 1067 trading blog posts gives me access to many different trading philosophies and ideas pertaining to strategies, backtesting, indicators, development, psychology, etc.  Since I am a beginner, it is important to expose myself to a wide variety of trading activity to help determine what resonates with me and will ultimately become my style of trading.

I managed to complete a bit of reading and studyinhg this month, but I fell short on all three of my reading assignments.  I only read 88 of the 112 pages I should have read in "Option Volatility and Pricing".  I only completed 133 of the 270 pages I should have studied in "Excel 2007 Data Analysis for Dummies".  I only read 130 of the 180 pages I should have read in "Excel 2007 Power Programming with VBA".  I need to make more of an effort to meet my reading objectives.  Possible improvements could come from reading during my lunch hour, staying an hour later after work to study, and reading before going to bed instead of watching TV.  Note to self:  NEVER PURCHASE A TV FOR YOUR BEDROOM!

I believe one of the reasons I did not meet my reading objectives was I spent a 53 hours backtesting breakout ideas, substantially more than I initially intended.  Before I can simulate trading, I need to determine a trading edge.  I am not looking for something revolutionary, but I do need something that could potentially produce a small profit because i would like to evaluate slippage and commisions on the profit.  This is why I did not study the ThinkOrSwim trading platform tutorials or create a sample trade journal.  the objectives are better left until after I have determined a basic trading strategy and I am ready to focus on virtual trading.  Nevertheless, I need to do a better job of reporting my backtesting results on this blog.  I have a couple of studies on Volume and 1 Day Weakness which i have completed, but have yet to archive on the blog.

Speaking of archiving, I didn't archive any of the important trading blog posts that I read this month in my email account.  I made this an objectvie because I wanted a personal data bank of the trading blog posts I thought were memorable in case the owners blog went down, or google reader crashes, etc.  Also, it is a little difficult to search google reader in any kind of detail, especially for older posts beyond 2 years.  Archiving the important trading posts in my email account will allow me to access them whenever i like regardless of what is happening with the actual blog.  Also, the search capabilities of my email account are much better than google reader.  There is one setback.  If I try to email more than 10 blog posts to myself from google reader, google interprets my actions as somekind of nefarious intruder trying to hack their system.  Google immediately locks me out of my google reader account for the remainder of the day.  This will make the archiving process a little slower than I expected.

All in all it was a good first month for the blog and my development.  I am looking forward to improving on the areas I mentioned above during the next month.