Happy New Years Eve Everyone! and Good Bye 2011!

I started “blogging” on HotStockMarkets, here’s a link to my original thread on there: http://www.hotstockmarket.com/t/83096/notsoluckys-binary-option-forex-trading-journal. First post was on Christmas at night. So in that regards, it’s already been 1 year since I’ve blogged. Financial Trading Journal as you know it today wasn’t even registered until May 1st, 2011. Realisticly though, this blog in the beginning of the year was using the domain www.binaryoptiontradingjournal.com, that was registered on Jan 22nd, 2011, also the same day as my hosting was initiated. BUT (last point), it was only on Jan 24th, 2011 that everything was set up and fully operational. So technically speaking, the birthday of this blog is Jan 24th, so it hasn’t been a full year yet! I’m still making this post now to show what I’ve accomplished this calender year to end it off.

Below, I’ve posted the google analytics stats for this blog, from Jan 24th, 2011 to today (which FYI isn’t even over yet, so I’m missing about 14 hours of stats):

First picture simply shows the overview on google analytics from Jan 24th, 2011 till Dec 31st, 2011 (10:02AM today). The second chart shows the breakdown by month into: visits, unique visitors and page views. I plotted the breakdown on a line chart as well for visual comparison. Ignoring pageviews and simply looking at visits and unique visitors, I’ve been growing in exposure steadily thru out the year. I’m not sure if I set it up properly, but I have a filter on google analytics to ignore my ip address, the only problem is that I implemented this sometime in March, that’s why January data is really skewed because the lack of visitors but huge pageviews signifies the start up work I had to do to check the site out.

I do acknowledge that I got a bit active this month, so that may have caused the jump in views and visitors. It’s a rather drastic jump though, let’s assume the filter doesn’t work, at most 500-800 of the views are my own for blog editing. That still leaves 2,000 views, which is double the consistent 1,000 views the past 4 months. Onwards and upwards is the key here!

For my regular visitors, you’ll know that I get active on and off thru out the year depending on my school schedule or if I’m trading or whatever else is on my plate. For a good blog to fluorish, it has to have consistent new content to keep new people coming. As time progresses, I will continue to learn, evolve and continuing providing new content as I see fit.

That’s all for the logistics/stats of the site, onto my personal life and my accomplishments / progress. I’ll start off by giving an updated profit / loss chart:

When I started trading binary options last December (and making money), I decided to set a goal for myself this year to go big but that didn’t happen. My strategy got killed under regular trading conditions, which had worked so well previously under holiday conditions. I failed miserably for the first 4-5 months of the year, then I decided to change my route and go back to basics. Switched to spotFX to try out demo, then tried a micro account, started doing FX weekly analysis (which was pretty euccessful for myself and economic outlooks for trading) then a bigger FX account to end off the summer. After which, I got really inactive here on the blog and only did the FX weekly analysis series until I started trading again this month.I’ll post the summary of the FX weekly analysis again for reference:

Overall, a good learning experience this year. I’ve now been exposed to different market conditions, I have an idea of what works and what doesn’t. I’m more PA (price action) oriented now rather than relying on the purely technicals or fundamentals previously. The outlook is a good one when I start actively trading (if I get the opportunity to).

I’d like to take this moment to thank all my regular visitors for coming to my blog and keeping up with my trading life! I’d like to thank David as well, owner of Binary Options Daily, he helped me with incoming traffic for the first 8 months intially contributing as much as 50% of my traffic. As my site has grown, incoming traffic is growing in terms of organic searches from Google and less from referring traffic. I am a Moderator on his site, so that’s where you’ll usually find me if I’m online, I use the live chat there.

PS: This post is simply a summary to conclude this year, the outlook/goals will be posted tomorrow for the start of 2012!

Cheers,
Brian