J.C., a.k.a. NYSE Scalper, has done another insightful monthly review. As with his previous monthly recaps (they're linked in his sidebar), you can learn a lot and / or be reminded of many of the things that you likely have read about in books about trading. His posts also illustrate the benefits of good record keeping. There's no way you could do that kind of analysis without keeping a good journal.
Aside from the raw statistics, what's really interesting to me is J.C.'s commentary. He talks about worrying about consistency, losing his confidence, feeling demoralized, lack of focus, technical difficulties with his trading system, lack of patience, getting angry / emotional / frustrated, not letting winners run, etc. I'm sure anyone who's traded for any length of time can relate to most, if not all, of that. Whenever I hear people saying these type of things I always ask them if they've read "Trading in the Zone". It, and books like it (one of these days I'm going to read one of Dr. Steenbarger's books), are just as important, if not more so, than books about entries, exits and other "real" trading stuff. If your psychology isn't right you're going to fail. Keep in mind that J.C. had all these issues during a profitable month, imagine if he'd actually lost money!
The other thing that really stood out to me was him talking about "way too much Level II trading going on". I always tell people that I think Level II is useless, unless, possibly, if you're a scalper. So given that J.C. is a scalper I found the following to be quite interesting:
Way too much "Level II" trading going on (trading based on what I see on the Level II) - I think it's because the charts don't show any setups, but the Level II sometimes just looks so tempting and makes it look so easy to make some money that way - yes, it's easy alright... easy to lose money!
There are plenty of other good insights in that post so go read it already!
