What your portfolio stats can tell you about you

What Do My Stats Say About Me?

For traditional financial traders, one of the most common techniques to keep track of investment results over the years has been to keep a journal. Normally a journal would consist of a chart, the reasoning behind the trade (perhaps there was an announcement that favored one currency over another) the various stops that were placed, and the results of the trade.

Sounds boring, doesn’t it?

Lucky for you, the eToro OpenBook does all the journal keeping for you, but just because you no longer have to do any manual journal keeping, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t regularly check in on your own profile. What your stats can tell you may surprise you!

Your favorite markets may not be your most profitable ones

Take a look at your portfolio. By setting the time period for 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, etc., you can see which markets/people you’ve invested in the most. You can also see the performance for each investment instrument. Do these two match up? More often than not, you’ll actually discover that your favorite markets are not the ones that have made you the most profits, because we all tend to be more cautious and level headed when it comes to markets that we’re not as familiar with.

If you find that this is the case, consider decreasing your risk and exposure in your favorite market, and allocating more equity to the markets in which you were most successful. Even a small decrease and reallocation (of 2-3%) can make a huge difference to your performance.

Find the chart patterns that work best for you

For technical traders, instead of keeping a chart journal, by looking at your trade history and finding your entry/exit points (you can find more detailed info on each trade in the WebTrader), you can use these to see which technical patterns you favor when deciding to enter a trade.

Using this method you can find which particular pattern (or patterns) leads to more profitable trades, and then favor this pattern over others as a trend indicator. For instance, you may find that you actually do better when entering a trade following daily flag patterns, and you can use this knowledge to seek out this specific pattern in the charts.

Your best copied trader may not have the optimal allocation

Your portfolio breakdown can also tell you which traders have performed the best over the course of your copy trading relationship. All you have to do is set the view to “People” rather than “Markets”.

A few key tips to analyzing this data:

• Look at “Total Profit” rather than “Earned Profit”, as this figure also takes in current losses
• Based on this figure and your allocation, calculate the gains percentage

If the trader in your copy trading portfolio with the highest gains percentage isn’t the one with the biggest allocation, consider shifting your allocation by removing funds from less profitable copy relationships and adding them to the most profitable ones.

These are just a few tips on how to use the stats in your portfolio.

Original Article Written By Abby Tsype