General Info:
- Age 33 & 35, my wife and i are trading together as a team.
- my wife is fulltime trading since a half year now (i still have a regular job),
since that time we are starting to get profitable. Next to that, i have the "usual"
history of many traders, i lost about 50k in the 5 years before, by making a lot of
stupid mistakes until i understood what trading is about to the level where i am now
together with my wife.
- we use "psycho cybernetics" and NLP to train our minds and dwell in "The zone"
- Currently we only trade stocks in germany and US, i am recently evaluating our
strategies on e-minis.
- While my wife is mostly the discretionary trader, i support her with technical and
fundamental analysis. She is the portfolio manager, so she finally decides what to
trade, i just keep her in "control" by moneymanagement and support her by
coaching the proper mindset and set up new challenges through retrospectives.

SWING-Trade Setup
- trading support/resistance (and failures) in german mid and small cap stocks
(MDAX, SDAX, TECDAX)
- screening 150 Charts every week once, watch the ones that were noted closely the
next week for potential trades. Here we "force" intuition by watching only 2sek on a single chart.
- trade long and short positions
- Ratio 3:1 with 1 R = 300,00€ at the moment
- Trade must have potential to achieve 3:1 ratio to support/resistance (analysed by NT)
- Account Balance is 100k, leveraged up to 250k (not everything for this strategy)
- Holding about 5-10 Positions at the same time with this strategy
- Current Target: 1.000€ consistent every month with 1R = 300,00€ and only Swings. This is a
minimum to evaluate, we do take every trade that occurs and are not limiting ourselfs to 1.000€.
- Initial Stops placed by chart reading, risk adjusted position size
- Taking Profits on 1R (Break Even), 2.5R (2R Profit) and target at 3R

Sample at the screenshot below of one current Swing Trade, the stock was BOT at 25,16€ as the
rebound seemed to be established. The trade is now at break even and waiting to take profits as it reaches
higher highs.


What to expect from the Journal:
This is an additional strategy i made for me and my wife, so that we can take monthly
profits next to our long term trades. I will track the weekly events on P/L and some additional info.
On a monthly basis, i will reevaluate our target and have some statistics drawn, so we can use it
as an retrospective what went good and what has to be improved the next month.

Week 24.11 to 30.11
- BOT 5 SWING positions, 4 longs 1 short.
- BE on two positions after 3 days
- STP-BUY open on 2 more stocks

Retrospective:
- Trades according to MM rules
- Short position, while general market is up is more dangerous, but this was known and calculated. We are ready to reverse if the support breakout was a failure (prepared by visualizing).
- I will be more objective with my charts to distinguish between Swings and Turns
- Some trades were "too late" according to were a rebound occoured, i will be more strict on this next week

You can attach screenshots to posts instead of embedding them from third party providers, and it will work.

Mike

Week 03.12 - 07.12
- reversed the short as our stop was hit (-1R)
- taken 2R, 3R then 4R profit on the "skyrocket"
trade (see screenshots) by raising the stop.
- BOT another Swing according to rules and MM
- Holding 6 Swings right now


Retrospective
We did as planned with the short and reversed it to long without much hesitation, it still feeled a bit uneasy to reverse an initial idea, but we executed correctly.

The first trade is a real skyrocket, nice to see the trade advancing like that and that the strategy fits to follow such a rally after 3R with tight stops. Neverless, this shouldn't be expected everytime, a profit between 2R and 3R is more likely to happen. It felt much more easy to take profits on Swings then on our longs.

The last swing was again a bit too late, therefore we focused more on recent rebounds while screening the charts this time. We also tried to focus on trades that have a potential to make money fast, so we looked more closely at the avg. time in market we would have if we followed some recent swings of a screened stock.

Generally it was a decent second week while starting our journey to smaller time frames. We still need to get more used to it, but the strategy will generate enough trades to speed up learning. Execution was ok, not perfect, but we did not make any bigger mistakes we are (currently) aware of.

Week 10.12 - 16.12
- stopped out on the skyrocket (+4R)
- BE on the reversed trade as we had 1R. Raised stop to 2R and stopped out (+2R) the day after.
- One trade stopped out with loss (-1R)
- BOT three more Swings
- Cleared on one stock (+0,48R) for margin requirements. Well we should now that if you not expect all orders for a
day to be filled it exactly happens then... one too much for the memorandum. We should be more careful of our
margin requirements/leverage. Current leverage factor is 2.37, lets get it below 2.0, holidays are coming anyway.
- BE on another position
- 2R profit stop on one position


Retrospective
Since my wife is a volcano when it comes to trading ideas, we need a lot of money to play every idea she comes up with. I really hate to see her ideas working and us sitting on the side since our capital is already fully invested, but somehow we have to get used to this. Our leverage factor is on the limit, so we are as always tending to overtrade when things run fine. I am not sure if this is actually a bad habbit, surely overtrading is a bad thing when you try to get out of a drawdown, but when you are "in the zone" and things flow easily... need to think that through. Fact is, we are trading on the edge of our leverage and capital limits, although our risk is always limited, a margin call is a sign that something is wrong (even when it happens when you are up).

Execution was ok on every trade this week, MM and rules were followed without hesitation.

Week 17.12 - 23.12
- one winner (+2R)
- one loss (-1R)
- BOT 4 more Swings, 6 Active
- "promoted" one BE swing to our longs because of fundamental changes and possible acquisition
- All trades according to rules and MM


Retrospective
We learned in the last few weeks that reversing an initial trade idea when the markets signals it, is a skill we should master.
We learned that a second try is always an option, its never too late to enter a trade if you got whipsawed and see your initial idea working afterwards.
Intuition of my wife what to sell in case of emergency (the margin call) is superior to mine. I tend to get more emotional one situations that are not planned,
most likely my sight on the market is limited in that state, so she should take over at this point. We will prepare better next time by writing down an additional emergency strategy in our business plan.
The margin call made chaos in planning and confuses the flow. Hard to sell good stocks if you must, because of stupidity.
Swings work even better when whole markets are in a good swing state.

System stats for Dez2012
Statistics for the swing system first month. Naturally these values are very rough, since we only have a small sample right now.

Expectancy/STDDEV-R is 0.39 (rating "excellent")
SQN is 0.92 which is 3.87 on n = 100 (rating "excellent")
Expectancy is 0.80, which would require about 10 trades / month to meet the system goal of 8R / month.

Business Plan Update
- Target for strategies "long" and "swing" set to: 8R / Month after one year period
- Target for all strategies: Expectancy/STDDEV and SQN (n=100) to be "good" or better
- 1R start for this year in Strategy: Long is 600€ (Allocation: 175k)
- 1R start for this year in Strategy: Futures is $500 (Allocation: 10k)
- 1R start for this year in Strategy: Swings is 300€ (Allocation: 75k)
- Strategy Update: This year swings will be choosen from NASDAQ 100 (lower costs, market diversification, optimal trading time in CET, more liquidity)
- Strategy Update: Longs will now be trailed by our volatility stop after break even instead of chartreading (no emotions, measureable)
- Strategy Update: Break even trades need to cover costs, therefore take 0.25R on systems "swing" and "long" and 10% of risk on system "futures" next to pos.avg. (reduce trading costs on break even trades)

Strategies CW 1 - 2

System 1: Longs CW2
- BOT one long in NASDAQ
- active = 1

System 2: Swings CW2
- 3 Winners (+7,25R)
- One loss (-1R)
- active = 9

System 3: Futures from CW1
- 3 contracts on YM,NQ,ES on the fiscal cliff news (+4,6R)
- active = flat

Retrospective
- we still struggle sometimes between pure discretionary trading vs. our rule based strategies. generally all our entries are discretionary, we have rules what condition must be in place, but the final decision if the time and instrument is right, is the gut instict of my wife. often she finds instruments where she as a strong feeling, but they do not fit into any of our stratgies... so we let the trades go, nearly every time to our disadvantage.

- we have new debriefing checklists for discipline and daily, weekly and monthly tasks that have to be done (from big picture analysis to taxes and doing something for our health). We both are still working on our old habits and failed to achieve the requirements on the checklists several times... we will get better in this.

- one of my disadvantges is, that i am sometimes sloppy when it comes to adjusting orders or writing down values for our statistics. This week again, i made at least two major mistakes in adjusting the orders wrong. I will be more careful on this and will let my wife doublecheck.

- since i start working again at my job, my wife needs to use all analysis tools by herself and she has to get more used to them. this week she had problems adjusting one of the indicators, which led to a late entry and some profits on the table. i will give her a better overview and some more scenarios, so she will be prepared whatever comes.

- execution was good, no rules broken on the strategies, position sizing used properly (one small mistake in dollar/euro conversion!)