I will probably do a more in depth look at the year later on but in preparing my thoughts I generated the following chart courtesy of Finviz.
Each year I like to look back at the major trends and gauge whether I spotted them and also whether I managed to take advantage of them. Charts like this are a little bit unrealistic but they do give a good sense of what moved in the YTD and how much of a move was available for capture. It is then useful to measure yourself against these benchmarks. Upon looking at this I have to admit that I didn’t get as much out of the markets as I should have – particularly the Nikkei which I was in but I just didn’t seem to get the traction that that the market offered. Part of my year end review is to try and work out why I didn’t extract as much as I should have from these moves and then to try to remedy this for next year. This is easier said than done if it is a technical issue such as the system simply not firing because it is incorrectly configured. However, if it is a psychological issue then this is a little harder to deal with. I think in part the reason I didn’t extract as much from the market as I might have expected looking at these moves is distraction bias. I find it hard to fully engage a new system until I have got into the rhythm of how the system performs and part of this year was deploying a new system that can be used as the basis for an advisory service. So I was only partially on my game – this is easy to fix….pay attention.
