Real Money Test Results

First 2 Months of Swing Trading

I started swing trading for real at the end of October 2024. Before that I had done a lot of trading. I had some winners, many losers but mostly my portfolio was flat/doing little better than a cash deposit account. In October 2024 I made the following changes:

• I started a trading diary in Excel.
• I used a single signal for entry points - in this case 52 week lows.

At the time of writing in August 2025, October 2024's trades are 78% profitable. November's figure is 74%. The combined mean CAGR of the profitable trades is currently 31.7%. At the end of November 2024 the main test portfolio was up 3.3%.

The strategy of only buying 52 week lows of quality dividend stocks appeared to be a good one. It was profitable from the start. However, I did make one major initial mistake:

• Selling too soon. Like many rookie traders I would sell a stock once it had made a 2-3% profit. I soon learned my lesson because I sold Direct Line Insurance for 1% in November 2024. A couple of days after it soared 32% on news of a takeover announcement. My solution to this was to place a LIMIT SELL order immediately after buying a stock so it would automatically sell without me having to make any decisions regarding the selling of stocks.

First 6 Months of Swing Trading

The key concept to master in the first 6 months is to develop absolute confidence in the strategy. Although I could see that it clearly worked, I didn't have absolute confidence.

The market had a major wobble around Christmas. Both of the main accounts I was testing it in went into a small drawdown. I wasn't too concerned about this. When I ran my backtester it was relatively common for it to go into drawdown in the first year.

Little did I know that the market was about to go into meltdown, and April 2025 was one of the largest crashes I have experienced in my investing career. Lessons learnt:

• I had enough faith in my strategy to not sell anything in April 2025 (unless it had reached my pre-determined profit point).
• I didn't have enough faith to buy stocks and ETFs when they were so obviously oversold according to my signals.

At the time of maximum pain I decided not to look at my portfolio. That was kind of good but I should have been buying up the many bargains that were on offer.

The main portfolio was down 6.2% at one point. It might have been lower than this but I only record end of week data and the low point was reached on a Monday. What was interesting is there was less drawdown than all of the indexes I track, apart from the FTSE 100.

To improve at trading you need to make the occasional change once the results suggest something needs tweaking. The main change I made to my overall swing trading strategy was to test out some different indicators. While 52 week lows appeared to be a good strategy, they were starting to become less frequent [after a big market correction it's far less likely for quality stocks to make further 52 week lows for a while].

I decided to introduce the other strategies that are listed on the strategies page. The first strategy I added was buying 50 day lows. These are more common than 52 week lows. They will also appear in the highest quality stocks that rarely if ever put in 52 week lows.

I also introduced the Williams %R indicator. I did this because I felt that 52 week lows weren't always THE bottom of a stock's descent into oversoldness. I felt that other indicators might help in finding a better bottom.

The two major mistakes made in the first 6 months:

• Overconfidence. Once I could see the strategies were working, I started seeking much higher profit points. Foolishly I should have trusted my backtester, which consistently showed that with swing trading it is generally more profitable to go for small 5% profits than wait a lot longer for a 25% profit.
• Currency issues. In my larger investment account I was trading USD denominated stocks in a GBP account. This absolutely smashed returns when the USD tanked in April 2025, making the real money testing look a lot worse than it actually was. My solution has been to open a USD account for trading US listed stocks.

First 9 Months of Swing Trading

I have continued to introduce new changes.

After 6 months the losing trades have become much more apparent. Dealing with losers is the best way to increase swing trading profits. So I examined some of the initial stock purchases I made that had not yet sold for a profit. The lessons learnt here are:

• Increase stock quality. Once I could see the strategies were working, I started seeking much higher profit points. Foolishly I should have trusted my backtester, which consistently showed that with swing trading it is generally more profitable to go for small 5% profits than wait a lot longer for a 25% profit.
• Remember the backtester. The backtester told me to avoid: stocks not paying a dividend, stocks that cut their dividend, stocks coming out of a valuation bubble, deeply cyclical stocks. The real money tests have been showing that most of the losers are in one or more of these categories. There are a few that looked good but still fell heavily. I will continue to hold these. Slowly they are either recovering or they are getting taken over [Plymouth REIT was an example: it soared 38% on takeover news and I exited my position after 279 days for 12.1% profit + around 3% in dividends].

The main portfolio is now up 10.1% on an annualised basis. My larger account is flat, but will be up once currency is taken into account. The accounts are not yet beating the indexes I track. However they are catching up. The CAGR of recent trades has been much higher than the early trades. I expect the accounts will go into overdrive once the existing trades exit and are replaced with far superior potential trades. My new USD denominated account is looking extremely good and is currently outperforming the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq despite being 25% cash. But it's still early days for this account.

The other point I'll make is the portfolios are extremely overweight value stocks. These have not performed as strongly as growth stocks in 2025. This may change at some point. In August 2025 the Nasdaq had a wobble and the flood of money into value stocks really supercharged my swing trade performance for this month.

First Full Year of Swing Trading

See this video for a summary of my first year of swing trading:

I need to be honest, value stocks are not having a good time of it lately. The portfolio is slowly grinding upwards, but it's not keeping up with the general runaway market.

I will continue to hold value stocks because I was working and then made redundant during the 2000 tech bubble. My landlord at the time was fully invested in technology stocks. When the bubble burst his holdings lost 94% of their value. The Framlington NetNet fund he was invested in was ultimately liquidated in October 2001 - it NEVER recovered [source].

The two strategies with the highest win rate are Williams %R on the weekly chart and buying stocks or ETFs after they gap down more than 3%.

I am continuing to hunt for a swing trading strategy that would be 100% profitable:

First 14 Months of Swing Trading

I have had a major realisation: I need to move away from obsessing over my Win Rate. I have now decided to focus on Expectancy. This is a much better indicator of trading performance. The formula is available online. Basically it averages the percentage wins and subtracts the percentage losses. If the resulting number is positive then your trading is (or should be) profitable. It really is as simple as that.

I have now added Expectancy calculations to all of the stock charts on BTFDBot. This makes it much easier to gauge whether a particular trading strategy has been profitable for a given stock. Obviously it is not a perfect guide to future performance - there are too many other variables that will affect that.

I have updated my Excel trading diary and now calculate Expectancy per month and also per trading strategy. I have also added all of the drawdowns of the losers and have added in the current state of each of my open positions. The good news is that I have largely had positive Expectancy in each of the months I have been trading. January 2025 was my worst month (-0.79% per trade). My best month was April 2025 (+5.09% per trade). April 2025 marked the tariff crash when a large amount of stocks became oversold.

The bad news is that many months have had very low expectancy. While I believe that the figures will improve as more losing positions ultimately become profitable, they should be much higher. I have made the following changes for the trades I have placed in December 2025 and onwards:

• I am now seeking a 6% profit point on most trades. This is up from 5.5% since August and 5% earlier in the year. I believe that this simple change should improve Expectancy by 20%, and with little potential downside. Going forward I would like to introduce a trailing stop loss system to lock in much higher profits. However this will have to wait until I devise a way of coding trailing stops into BTFDBot. It would also be more time consuming to implement in my real money accounts.
• I have largely discontinued the use of the Williams %R oscillator strategy. While I have had a good win rate using this strategy, I believe that the Expectancy score on trades placed using this oscillator are proving to be far lower than those of other strategies.
• The main strategy I am using now is the Super Oversold strategy. This is a strategy I have developed exclusively for BTFDBot. I discovered it after experimenting with setting stop losses on trades. I noticed that the 20% stop loss level I was using often coincided with a major bottom in the stocks I was trying to use stop losses with. That lead me to wonder what would happen if I simply bought more of the stock at this price, rather than selling my existing holdings. Backtesting with the BTFDBot database showed this strategy to be potentially very profitable indeed.
• I am still continuing to use the Large Gaps Down strategy. It has been performing well. I am also buying selected 52 Week Lows and 50 Day Lows. 50 Day Lows are actually my most profitable strategy according to my trading diary. However there could be timing bias with regards to when I was using the strategy the most often. 50 Day Lows are quite high risk but they can be the only real oversold entry point in the super high quality stocks like McDonalds, Visa, Berkshire Hathaway and Coca-Cola.
• I am also still using Rate of Change, although I am now more cautious on this one after seeing the backtesting results of using it with UK listed mid-caps. I have fine tuned the Schwab ThinkOrSwim indicator for this. They are of course also displayed on BTFDBot.
• I am now logging the source of the buy signal in my trading diary. This will allow me to assess whether BTFDBot, FinViz, ThinkOrSwim or a few other data sources are truly good sources of buy signals.
• Having neglected BTFDBot for a few months, I am now actively using the backtester on most of the stocks I buy. I am also buying the US and UK buy signals it generates [the UK signals are not displayed on this site because of data licensing issues but I post them on my YouTube channel, usually on Sundays].
• My trading diary is showing that ETF trading has been extremely successful (88.7% win rate against 68.1% for stocks). I am trying to prioritise ETF trades. However there haven't been that many buy signals lately. When they do appear they should pop up on BTFDBot.
• Analysis of the trades with the biggest losses have shown that they're mostly cyclical (especially chemical companies) or are BDCs or the company does stuff I don't understand. I have exited all of my open positions in BDCs and will not buy any more. They are mostly value traps, luring in unsuspecting investors with their super high dividends.