The below table summarized my trading returns, along with my investment returns over the last 27 months. As you can see, trading has given me exceptional returns over the last 27 months, but poor returns over the last year.
The months of January and February have been particularly bad for my trading returns. The BankNifty (which constitutes almost 80% of my trading portfolio) yo-yoed in a strict range for 2 months. In addition, I think we biased ourselves in favor of extremely fast strategies. This had a tendency to really ruin returns in such a market environment.
The important thing to note is that we still have positive returns for banknifty trading till February in the financial year 2018-19. The loss has come almost entirely from commodity futures, interest rate futures and options trading. For six months, though, we quite outshone every other benchmark by trading. This was because of a wonderful run in August and September.
This is all what trend following trading is all about. Sharp bouts of phenomenal performance, followed by a long period of drawdown. The challenge for any portfolio constructor is to minimize the extent and frequency of drawdown. We are still in a learning phase as far as that is concerned.