Overview

TRADELOGGER USER MANUAL

TradeLogger is a simple program that keeps track of the growth of your trading equity and plots it on a graph against a simple moving average. This is all about being able to manage your money by avoiding trading "real" money in times when you are experiencing a series of losses or drawdowns.

This is a money management technique that can sometimes improve trading performance by modifying your activity based on crossovers of a moving average of the equity curve. The basic idea is to either trade in "sim" mode or "live" mode when the equity curve crosses above or below its moving average.

There are at least two basic ways to implement this idea. One is to stop trading when the equity curve crosses above or below its moving average and to resume trading on a crossover in the opposite direction. This is the most basic and commonly used method. You would typically stop trading when the equity curve crosses below the moving average if your system or method tends to produce streaks of wins and losses, so that when it starts to lose, it's best to stop trading until it starts winning again.

On the other hand, if your system or method tends to "revert to the mean" -- after several wins, it starts to lose, and vice-versa -- you would typically stop trading after the equity crosses above the moving average. A dependency analysis can be used to determine if your system has either of these tendencies with statistical significance. This is a bit advanced for the basic use of the program, but is a feature that I'm interested in implementing within TradeLogger in the future.

TradeLogger is designed to be as simple as possible to use for the new trader. Its intent is to be able to tell the trade, in the most simple way possible, when to be trading "live" and when to be trading "sim". No matter what type of system you trade, you are inevitably going to experience times of drawdowns, or losses, that are beyond your control. This type of money management tool is there to aid in mitigating those drawdown periods.

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