27 Months of Trading Results

As Enough Wealth pointed out, I lost $107 per month from trading during the period I posted data for this morning. But that sample is biased to include the last good month before "the slump" started (May 2007) till the first month that I consider good again (March 2008). This chart shows monthly results since the beginning of 2006 in terms of realised short term gains on securities, options, and futures:



On average I gained $560 per month but as you can see progress was very erratic and the average is not statistically different from zero at conventional levels of signficance. On the other hand, the trend of cumulative gains appears to be positive in a very statistically significant way. But cumulative gains is a random walk - and so this is known as a spurious regression - the results appear significant to the naive observer, but they are not. When we are looking at a random walk we need to do statistical tests on the changes in the series.

Anyway, results in 2006 were highly variable and erratic - some big gains and some huge losses. Things calmed down in 2007 and 2008 but there were more losing months. The jury is still out on whether I can make a success of this.