I started this week with an account balance of roughly $1450 and took a total of 11 day trades through out the course of the week. Now my account balance stands at about $1370 or essentially I netted a loss of about $80 from this week's trading. While I was not green, the loss was not horrible considering that I'm still pretty much a newb day trader and I currently risk about $50 per trade and pay a minimum of $10 per round trip.

Of the 11 trades I took, 5 were winners while the other 6 were losers for a 45.45% accuracy. My average winning trade stood at $54.26 while my average loser stood at $58.51 or 0.93 win to loss ratio. My largest winning trade was $90.91 while my largest loser was $106.01. 

Takeaways from this week of trading: my accuracy and win-loss ratio are that of a break even trader. I would much rather see my accuracy around 60% and my win-loss ratio around 1.5. In an effort to accomplish these improvements in my trading metrics; I will make 3 key adjustments.

a) Narrow my focus to the stocks I am best at trading. My best trades come from stocks in the $1 - $20 price range with float below 100 million that are gapping/breaking out on above average volume due to fresh news. To facilitate this I will use Trade Ideas to scan for these stocks in pre-market and after the open.

b) A further adjustment I will make in an effort to improve my trading accuracy is to try as best as possible to align my trades with the trend in the overall market. To do this I will add a 30-minute chart of the $SPY to my trading platform default layout. So this way I don't find myself jumping into a long set-up that looks really good only to get stopped out minutes later because the general "tide"of the markets had turned/been bearish.

c) In order improve my win-loss ratio; I need to decide before I enter a trade whether it will be a "scalp" type trade or an "intra-day swing" type trade. For scalps I'm simply looking for a quick move 2-3 times my risk then get out in 1 sale or scale out in halves within 5-25 minutes . For intra-day swing type plays; I'll be looking to hold all day; possibly add to my position if I have extra buying power and even hold a partial overnight/swing position with the intention of scoring a massive home run trade. These types of trades do not come about often; so its likely that 80% or more of my trades will be scalps. AEZS long on July 19th then short on July 21st are examples of the type of intra-day swing type play or even ZN long on July 6th then short on the 10th and 21st of July.

I'm so looking forward to making these changes come Monday and finishing of the month of August with a bang!