Getting my groove back

I steered clear of the market from open to close today. I was a bit squeamish to look things over after the close and after hearing that the indexes were down. I actually got my heart pumping a little bit because I was anticipating a loss. That's a sign that I'm still overly emotional.

Things went well today. The portfolio was up .58%. I'll take it.

I discovered that I messed up my computations for expectancy with 10% stops on my post a couple of days ago. I had put in the absolute value of the losses so they ended up being 10% GAINS instead of losses. That skewed the results a bit (OK, a lot). So the real expectancy given a 10% stop loss for the Zweig RS 5 screen over 244 trades was .27. Not quite as spectacular. That produces a 67% gain in a year with 1% of your portfolio at risk.

My goal is to create a system that produces at least 100% each year so I've still got some work to do. I can get the screen to make over 100% with 5% stops, but I think that might be a bit too tight. I'd like to be able to figure out if a 5% stop-loss would work, but I think the data-retrieval process would be too time consuming.