Top 10 best and worst trades of the last year

The end of June signals the end of the second complete year trading the system since I changed my stop methodology.  In that time, there have been just over 280 trades taken. A lot have been losers, but some have been winners.

Below I have summarised the top 10 winning and losing trades taken over the course of the last twelve months (for last years' list, go here). The trades shown below are included in the performance statistics summarised here:


Top 10 winners

 Top 10 losers

 Some notes:

• All of the above trades were long trades;
• 7 of the top 10 winning trades were European stocks. This was mirrored in the major indices, with for example the German DAX moving up to all time highs, while the FTSE basically flat lined;
• The last 12 months included a couple of periods of no trading activity for 2-3 weeks, such as when the US Government shut down over stalled budget negotiations - with the uncertainty in the markets at the time the safest course of action was to avoid taking new positions;
• Four of the losses were bigger than 1R - this is where the stock gapped through my intended stop levels, or there was a large element of slippage - the largest loss was discussed here;
• On the two largest winning trades I employed the Uniform Risk Exit (go here for more) - the closing price shown is the average closing price, and the closing date is when the trade was completely closed;
• As you can see, in most cases, the holding period for these losing trades was significantly shorter than the winning trades - in some cases the trades were closed within 24 hours of being opened;
• I opened far fewer trades in the year to 30 June 2014 compared to the previous year - this is as the market conditions were not as favourable for my style of trading. Sometimes less is more.

Not shown on here are the bulk of the trades made in the year - small profits and plenty of small losses. When utilising a trend following approach the key is to cut losses quickly, and to let profits run. These results obtained show this.

The overall returns on a month by month basis since July 2012 are shown here.

These trade signals were all per the system rules in my e-book, and were tweeted in real time to the members of the mentoring programme.