simoan wrote:It's good that you log all trades. I hope you also provide a comment with each trade to explain your thought process at the time and reason for the trade. This is something I failed to do for many years and so I never really learnt my lessons from mistakes and was unable to correct faulty thought processes. You will never get all decisions correct but if you are right on 60% of your investments you will make a lot of money over time.
re. the emboldened point - that is a really good idea. Do you mean just for sales? I guess for us, the thought process for buys, is mainly going to be (from now on): "Topping this up, price looks good, recent drop of 4% etc.. etc.."
Can you elaborate a bit on the kind of sort you write? If poss...
simoan wrote:These days I have an Excel spreadsheet that logs all trades with buy and sell prices against the current price (using eventide's very excellent tfl plug-in) so that I can check my thought processes are correct and see where I have gained or lost money on each trade. If the overall total is positive it shows I am adding value to my portfolio with my trades, if it's not then I need to give myself a kick where it hurts and closer examine all the buy and sell decisions where I gave up gains by selling or bought stupidly into losers. However, it is not something I look at on a daily basis - that way madness lies - maybe only every 2 or 3 months.
All we are really now is
1. logging all trades just "date, action, ticker code, quality, price/share"
2. logging all cash inputs to ISA (never withdraw), and extract market value each month - hence the ingredients for unitising a portfolio, something we are doing since 31 December after lots of recommendments from folk on the M&M portfolio review thread.
Matt