Recap January Trading With The Geek – A Big Fat Miss
You can’t win them all and winning is far from what the Geek did last month, read on to see just how much damage was done.
Binary Options Trades: You Can’t Win Them All
December was a great month, one of my best and the best in quite a while. January was for sure my worst month. So bad in fact that I think I’m still in denial. I see the results and I think, that’s not really me, that’s somebody else but nope, it’s me. The good news, and I may be grasping at straws, is that I didn’t get skunked, I made at least 1 win each week and one week I won 5 for 5. The bad news is that out of the 25 tips given for the month I only won 11, less than half and far from pretty. This puts my monthly win rate at 44%, well below the profit line, and even brought down my all-time win rate a little bit.
Total Cost Of Trading = $12,500
Total Return On Trading = $10,175
Net Return = ($2325) or -18% ROI
January, the first month of the year. In terms of the market, they say “how January goes so goes the rest of the year”. Well, I certainly hope that isn’t true because I straight up flushed January right down the toilet. There were 5 weeks which means 25 tips. Of those tips I won a mere 11 for a win rate less than 50/50 and we all know that it takes at least 56% to be profitable long term with your typical binary options. My total cost of trading was $12,500, I returned $10,175 and lost a net of -$2,325. Losses in the NADEX account were not as bad, I am able to close those out early when they go bad and many of the wins had higher rates of return than you get with the off-shore brokers.
What Happened In January?
What happened in January was a whole lot of nothing. The initial stage of the Trump rally was over, earnings season was a few weeks off, not much in the way of economic data and no FOMC meeting led to an incredibly flat market. So flat in fact that the SPX spent nearly the entire month within a tight 25 point range and the dollar began a slide that took it down to a multi-month low. For me it meant that many of my signals turned out to be false, many of my trades became losers. The good news is that fear and uncertainty surrounding the Trump presidency is beginning to subside and the market is getting back on track.
Week One January 3rd
“The market, it looks like it is set to rally and I think it could be a big one. We’ve got earnings growth on tap, economic growth set to expand, normalization of interest rates, stabilized oil prices and free market economics with the newly elected Donald Trump. I can’t think of a single reason why the market shouldn’t rally in 2017.” There is still no reason it shouldn’t, it just didn’t do it yet. I only won one trade this week, the SPX.
Week Two January 9th
“The rhetoric is flying, international relations are in upheaval… and the outlook for the economy is good. I’m a bull on equities right now, and the dollar, excited to see what 2017 will bring.” The rhetoric flew right into the fan and put the market in wait-and-see mode, and it’s still there. I won one trade this week, the SPX.
Week Three January 17th
“The word of the week is FADE, as in I am fading all of these corrections. That is all.” Ha, fade, sometimes I crack myself up reading what I wrote before. It was a good strategy but the problem turned out to be the dollar and diminishing bullishness which killed all my currency trades. I one 2 this week though, the SPX and Gold, I almost won Oil too but I missed it by a penny.
Week Four January 23rd
“The markets have all pulled back, corrected or relief rallied in response to the inauguration. Now they are all set up to continue the post-election trends. The US economy is set to explode this year as Trump lowers taxes, encourages businesses and deregulates the economy to a more reasonable level. All I see are good times ahead” The good times haven’t really started yet but at least this week my outlook on the market was in tune, I won all five trades.
Week Five January 30th
“Trump’s trumping the market again, and not in a good way this time. The immigration ban is nasty little problem for us to get through and may cause some correction. That being said the longer term outlook is still quite good, this too shall pass.” Well, it didn’t pass quickly enough for me to win more than 2 trades, the SPX and Gold. And once again I missed out on a win with Oil by a mere 2 cents.