The Edgewonk Custom Statistics are the most powerful tool ever to be used in a professional trading journal – why? Because you can use them in any way you want and combine them with the already powerful Edgewonk evaluation tools – no stone will be left unturned when it comes to analyzing your trading strategy and performance.
Here are some usage examples to spark your creativity.
1. Timeframe
In the beginning of their trading career, almost every trader is overly concerned with the granularity of the markets. Should I trade 5 minute charts or daily charts? What is better? Which is easier? Where is less noise?
In the end, the choice of the trading timeframes comes down to personal preferences, characters traits and the time available.
Setting up one Custom Statistic to track the different timeframes can help you find out what works best for you and show you where you make the best trades.
2. Trading session
Volatility and liquidity constantly change when new information or money enters and leaves the market. Many Forex strategies that work during the Asian session will have trouble during the London & New York crossover for example. Also, different currencies behave differently during the trading sessions.
As a stocks, futures or CFD trader you probably know that price behavior, volatility and momentum can differ significantly between the time right after the open, just before the noon lunch-time trading session or afternoon.
It pays off to know during which times your strategy performs best and then focus on those sessions exclusively. This makes your trading more time-effective and more cost-effective.
As a Forex trader, we suggest setting up one Custom Stat to track the different trading sessions. And as a stocks or futures trader, you could set up a Custom Statistics that tracks the different intraday times: Open, pre-lunch, post-lunch, afternoon, pre-close.
3. Hour Of The Day
Edgewonk tracks and analyses your performance in relation to holding times of your trades. That way you can easily see whether you are holding your losers longer than your winners, a common beginner mistake.
If you have a strategy which, for example, opens and/or closes trades at the close of the hourly bar, you could track which hour performs best for you – this is a deeper way of analysing sessions, as described in the previous point.
4. Big Round Numbers / Quality Of Support And Resistance Levels
If, for example, you trade a break and retest strategy, you could track if a big round number (price levels ending with .00) stops your trades from reaching the take profit target or whether it does not influence your performance.
You could also track how many touches a support/resistance level took before you set your trade. That being said, you can of course also incorporate this information into your setup itself – just name it “2nd retest”, “3rd retest”, etc.
5. Trailing Stop & Any Other Trade Management Strategy
Almost no one trades the “Set & Forget” approach, mostly because you can do a lot of good with (professional) trade management – sadly, most traders don’t and abuse the term ‘trade management’ to make impulsive in-trade decisions.
If, for example, you want to know how your 5 EMA ‘trailing stop’ strategy performs, simply create a stat called “Trailing Stop 5 EMA” and you can then filter all the trades where you used that strategy to evaluate the specific performance.
In combination with the Edgewonk trade management sheet you will even see whether you would have made more profits if you would have let the trade run instead of trailing your stop loss.
6. Exit condition
Knowing why you exited a trade is important, but understanding how different exit decisions impact your performance, takes performance analysis to a completely new level. Here are a few examples of how an exit condition Custom Statistic could look like:
Exit condition |
| Volume climax |
| New upcoming |
| Defend loss |
| Defend profit |
| Strong retracement |
| No momentum |
7. Market Condition
Many traders endorse a top-down approach: they look for trends on higher timeframes and then for entries on lower timeframes in that direction. With the custom statistic you could track whether your trade is going with or against the bigger trend.
You could also track statistics like risk on/risk off, high/low volatility (based on VIX numbers), high/low liquidity or ATR (Average True Range) values; it’s up to you really and the possibilities are endless.
In our other article we showed you why tracking trend direction is a MUST. Don’t miss this secret tip.
8. Confluence
The more factors of confluence you stack in your favour in a trade, the higher the probability of turning a profit. You could either use this stat as a pure counter (2 confluence factors, 3 confluence factors, etc.) or you could use combinations of factors and tools, e.g. “Fibonacci 50%”, “Fibonacci 50% + Support/Resistance”, “Fibonacci 50% + Support/Resistance + MA Cross”, etc.
The important thing here is: You will quickly see which confluence factors perform better and which things do not impact your performance.
9. Price action or formation
Although you can add a screenshot to your trades that show the entry and the type of trade, it can pay off to dedicate one Custom Statistic to track the actual entry trigger. If you are a price action trader, you could use Custom Statistics for actual price formations or patterns; and if you are a indicator trader, you could track things like convergences, divergences, cross-overs etc.
Candlestick |
Price formation |
Indicator condition |
| Doji | Double top | Convergence |
| Pinbar | Double bottom | Divergence |
| Engulfing | Supply | Cross-Over |
| Inside bar | Demand | Overbouht |
| Trendline break | Oversold |
10. News
News is a topic that is way underrated by most traders in the way that they simply ignore it.
If you do not follow news, and don’t want to, at least consider tracking whether and how your trade was influenced by high impact news. There are lots of great economic calendars out there, e.g. the one by Forex Factory.
Of course you could also track the outcome of the news (bearish/bullish, hawkish/dovish) and whether your trade was aligned with or against the news.
11. Psychological Factors
Psychology deeply affects our performance. Why not start tracking whether you had a workout before trading? Or whether you slept well? Or how you feel generally: do you want to trade, do you feel passionate about it, or do you only trade today because you feel like you have to trade? Maybe you feel depressed or overly happy?
It pays off to track these factors – and then create rules around them. Here are a few examples of psychology related Custom Statistics:
| Psychological factors |
| First trade loss |
| First trade winner |
| Up early and prepared |
| Rushed and did not prepare |
| Feeling tired |
| High energy |
| Stress in personal life |
| Not enough sleep |
Conclusion: Dissecting And Improving Your Trading Strategy Has Never Been So Easy And Efficient
Trading is essentially an information war. You compete with incomplete information against other players with incomplete information. Whoever has the most and best pieces of information, puts them together in an efficient way, and then takes the correct action upon it, will win. Edgewonk helps you do just that. It will give you the right information and suggestions on how to react to that newly gained knowledge.
The custom statistics are the missing piece in the puzzle of any other trading journal. Some of the examples in this article come from our users; if you have found a great Custom Statistic usage example, we’d love to hear from you in the comments below.