How do you calculate points per trade?

[GCB 10]

Often we say we made 10 points on this trade or 25 on that one. How do you calculate points per trade when you scale out of a trade.

 

Let's say you buy 5 YM contracts and sell 3 at +10, 2 at +20 and 1 at +30.

 

Do you say you got +30 on the trade?

 

Or do you take the average gain?

I.e. ((3 * 10) + (2 * 20) + (1 * 30)) / 5 = (80 / 5) = +16

 

Just wondering if everyone is reporting this the same way.

[calamitychris 10]

I just take my profit for the day and divide by 50 (for the ES). For example, if I made $300, its 300/50, so +6 points.

[notouch 10]

This is often used by signal providers to make their figures look better than they are. E.g. if they open with 3 contracts and take profit on one for +5 the second for +20 and the third for break even they will say the trade was +25. If on the other hand all 3 were stopped out for -20 they will say they made a loss of -20. In reality on YM the profit on the first trade would have been $125 while the loss on the second trade would have been been $300. I think trying to measure your success in terms of points is a nonsense. It's money that matters but no one wants to go into detail about their personal finances on a public forum.

[GCB 10]

I think trying to measure your success in terms of points is a nonsense. It's money that matters but no one wants to go into detail about their personal finances on a public forum.

 

Well, yes and no. You can't buy groceries with points. On the other hand if I say I made $10,000 this week that is meaningless if you don't know how much size I trade. If I tell you I trade 5 YM contracts per trade you'd be pretty impressed with my results. If I said I trade 50 you'd wouldn't be. With 50 YM contracts $10,000 is only 40 points, or 8 per day. With 5 contracts its 400, or 80 per day.

 

I'd just like to know how people calculate their points.

[jperl 11]

Often we say we made 10 points on this trade or 25 on that one. How do you calculate points per trade when you scale out of a trade.

 

GCB...here is how IntereactiveBrokers summarizes my trading day. In the attached summary it shows the contract traded, the number of buys ,number of sells,the average buy price, average sell price. So today I took 5 round trips for a net/contract of 790.14-789.50 = 0.64pts/contract traded

[james_gsx 16]

I just do points per contract.

 

For example, a 3 contract play and the first one was +10, the next +20, and the third stopped out I would label them all separately. Then at the end of the day I would tally it all up for (example) +10 on the whole trade.

 

Lets say I buy 3 YM at 13,200 and it moves to 13,210, the first contract is scaled out and I move my stop up to break even. Then it goes up to 13,220 and I scale out of the second trade, and then it retraced back to 13,210 and my third contract is stopped out.

 

1st contract - +10

2nd contract - +20

3rd contract - +10

 

Thats exactly how I would record it in my notes.

 

If it hit 13,210 then retraced to 13,200 then it would show

 

1st contract - +10

2nd contract - 0

3rd contract - 0

 

Then I would rank the trade accordingly.

[Soultrader 12]

I take the average for the entire position.

 

So lets say I took +10 for 1/2 position, +20 for 1/4 position, and +30 for 1/4 position. This will be an average of (10 + 25)/ 2 = 17.5 points.

 

I find it inaccurate for a trader to state he took 30 points in total when in reality that was only for a quarter position.