Monthly Review: September

Net PnL: +$34729.

Monster month and overall a real game changer. 17/19 positive days for the month, but dig a little deeper and it's not quite that good. 3 positive weeks and one break-even week (had both negative days that week).

A few new things introduced this month:
(1) 10:30am psychological check. Simply a self check on where I am in terms of my psychological capital for the day. Still developing this, but it seems to make a little difference - and is more importantly there to hopefully catch me the day that I definitely shouldn't keep trading.
(2) Went through my methodology and redefined it (as it's developed over time). Did this about 1/3 of the way through the month, and really happy with the results. Simply defining it helped ensure concise trades.
(3) Fixed max size. Prior to this month I had been trading with allowing 2x max size if it was a pre-mediated trade. This month I expanded that max size to a lot more - and it didn't work! It nearly resulted in a blow-up. So there's nothing wrong with "only" 2x max size for a high conviction setup.

Max sizes as they currently stand are:
$2-$10 -- 2000 shares.
$10-$20 -- 1000 shares.
$20-$30 -- 800 shares.
$30-$70 -- 500 shares.
$70+
ATR: 5+ -- 300 shares.
          <4 --500 shares.

Digger deeper into some of the key days.
(1) Nearly had 1 blow-up day. This turned into a $5000 day (28th).
(2) On the 27th I was sized into a trade, and miraculously realising it wasn't working about 10 minutes before a big swing in price. Would like to have think I would have taken stop when it triggered... But could have been very nasty - if the 28th lack of stop taking is anything to go by.
(3) 23rd my $11k day. Hindsight, I was trading this with too much size and it should have been around $4-$5k.
(4) 22nd. Would have been a negative day from trading on AVXL, was lucky SAEX came along - and worked... Was nearly a -7k day.
(5) 16th One of my losing days. Correct implementation of my methodology would have resulted in a roughly breakeven day.
(6) 14th Other losing day, would have been a winning day with correct implementation of methodology.

So to sum up: A lot of luck, narrowly avoided some big losses. Good to have a solid winning month to steer me in right direction though. Having strung together a really solid month psychological capital is high. This is really good, because with correct implementation of my methodology I shouldn't really have had a single losing day this month - this month gives me the ability to execute correctly in the coming month.