Shocking realization today:
I created several new calculations on my trading spreadsheet.
The first column was a cumulative profit per stock figure, where I could see how much profit I made over all the trades done for a particular stock
The second column was a running total of the long term profit over all the trades I had recorded.
The shocking thing was that basically my profits were cancelled out by my losses. This implies that effectively I would have done much better simply sticking my money in a monthly income fund like Realty Income, and collecting a small dividend every month.
In fact, if I had put all my available investment dollars in Realty Income in 2008, I would have probably made 200-300% gain.
In my 401K, I've been more successful at training myself to demand that my account balance increase every month
Here is a strategy idea for my stock trading. What if at the end of every month, if I haven't increased my balance, I sell any losing stocks in order to reduce further losses?
If my goal is to see my monthly trading account balance increase every month, how would that change my choice of investments?
It has worked well for my 401K. This is a a kind of trigger approach, where I make conservative investments based on my RSI and EMA trading patterns, then take gains in such a way that my account balance keeps increasing every month. If this means I gravitate to income type investments, this is probably a good thing.