I trade swings on paper, in public, and keep score honestly.
This is my ledger. Every swing trade I attempt, on paper, in the open, wins and losses alike. It's a record of what I did, not a suggestion of what you should do.
After the close I go through every stock I can trade, looking for one that went quiet, held its ground, and is moving again. If I find one, I write down where I'll enter, where I'm out, and how long I'll stay. If I'm in something, I write down what happened. That's Tonight's Almanac. It goes out once, after the bars are final.
Most nights it says Nothing today.
I trade on paper. I look for rising support, a tight range, and volume that dried up and came back, and I take only the strongest fifth of those against the market. I enter at the next open if it's inside my zone, hold fifteen sessions, and close on the fifteenth close. No target. My stop is a disaster stop, two daily ranges below my fill; if a stock gaps past it overnight, I count the bigger loss. No earnings inside the window, one position per story, and nothing new when the market's mood is against me.
Say I fill NVDA at 187.60 with my stop at 179.10. That's 8.50 a share between me and being wrong. I risk $10 on every trade, so I hold 10 ÷ 8.50, about 1.18 shares, a $221 position. The stop sets the size; I never choose it.
Fifteen sessions later it closes at 194.40, 6.80 a share above my fill. 6.80 ÷ 8.50 is +0.8R: $8 on top of the $10 I risked. Had it closed at 179.10 instead, −1.0R, the $10 gone. Had it opened at 176.55, below my stop, −1.3R, $13 gone, and the extra is the gap.
A wide stop makes a small position and a tight stop a bigger one, and the loss if I'm wrong is $10 every time. That's what makes one trade comparable to the next. Ten dollars is a unit, not a suggestion.
I set this before the first trade and I don't move it. At a hundred resolved trades I call it working if the stocks I picked beat the ones I could have picked over the same fifteen sessions, my exits cost less than a third of that edge, more than half my trades end positive, and I've been positive in more than one market mood. Near zero is break-even, which counts as not working. Below zero, not working, and I say so at the top of the page.
Expect months where everything I hold goes down together. One of them cost me a third of a year.
Each way I trade is an edition. Before one reaches this page it rehearses over two years of history, with the last six months held back and looked at once. Rehearsal can kill an edition; it can't prove one.
This is my third edition on paper. The first two didn't pass rehearsal, and I've said why. This one buys the strongest stocks at the turn and holds for fifteen sessions. Old editions stay in the ledger at their original numbers. I don't rewrite them.
resolved. Too early to rate myself.