Home · Forward test log · Week 2
Seven positions, eight contracts, six winners and one loss. Net +$658.92. The loss was not a losing trade, and that is the part of the week worth reading.
| Session | Printed | Taken | W / L | Net | Balance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mon 24 Aug | 1 | 1 | 1 / 0 | +$168 | $102,235 |
| Tue 25 Aug | — | 0 | 0 / 0 | $0 | $102,235 |
| Wed 26 Aug | — | 3 | 2 / 1 | −$32 | $102,203 |
| Thu 27 Aug | — | 1 | 1 / 0 | +$214 | $102,417 |
| Fri 28 Aug | — | 2 | 2 / 0 | +$308 | $102,726 |
| Week | — | 7 | 6 / 1 | +$659 | $102,726 |
One strike, taken on two NQ contracts. Gross $180, fees $11.52, net +$168.48. The account moved from $102,066.92 to $102,235.40.
A correction to my own first reading of this session. Tradovate reports a two-contract position as two separate rows, so its summary says "2 trades" and shows a $0.00 standard deviation on the winners. That is one fill split in half, not two identical trades, and I very nearly published it as though it meant something. It is a real trap in these reports and it is worth knowing about before you read anyone else's.
The number that matters is what the ticket promised against what arrived. Falcon printed a $105 target on one contract, so two contracts asked for $210. The account received $180 gross. Thirty dollars went to exit slippage, $15 a contract. Fees took $11.52 more.
Total friction: $41.52 of a planned $210. That is 19.8%. Almost a fifth of the planned win never reached the account, on a session where nothing went wrong and the trade hit its target exactly as written. This is the cost line that almost nobody publishes, and it is the reason a strategy aiming at small targets has to be judged on what the account received rather than on what the chart drew.
Two contracts rather than one is a sizing decision taken off the drawdown allowance and nothing else. A 100K account is allowed $4,000, and this size still leaves room. The fee figure confirms the count: $11.52 is exactly two round turns at the verified $5.76 NQ rate.
The printed count in the table above is the taken count. Falcon's HISTORY panel counts every strike in the chart's loaded history rather than the current session, so how many printed on Monday and went untaken is not recorded. That is a gap in the record and it is logged as one rather than filled in with a guess.
No fills. The weekly export has no rows for Tuesday, so nothing was taken. Whether Falcon printed anything I passed on is unrecorded, because the chart was not captured.
That is the second time in two weeks the same step of the routine has failed, after Thursday 20 August. It is also the step that makes this log worth reading, so it gets logged as a gap rather than filled in with a zero I cannot support.
Three positions, and none of them are Falcon resolutions. Each one was alive for exactly four seconds and closed nowhere near a target or a stop:
The broker flattened these by mistake. On a ticket carrying a 28-point stop and a target worth $105 to $220, a 2.5-point loss and a half-point win are not outcomes this strategy can produce. They measure the platform, not the edge.
Gross was −$15. Fees were $17.28. So the day cost $32.28, and more than half of that was commission on trades that never got to be trades. It goes in the log as a losing day because that is what the account says. Pretending it was a strategy loss would be wrong, and quietly deleting it would be worse.
One trade, long, one contract. Bought 29605.25 on the stop, sold 29616.25, which is the ticket's target to the tick. Eleven points, $220 gross, $5.76 in fees, net +$214.24. Eighteen seconds from fill to exit.
Put that next to Monday. Same strategy, same instrument, nothing done differently. Monday gave up 19.8% of the planned win to slippage and fees. Thursday gave up 2.6%. That range is what a small-target strategy actually lives inside, and it is invisible on a chart, which only ever draws the ticket price.
Sold 29591.25 and covered 29586.00 for $105 in seven seconds. Sold 29603.50 and covered 29592.75 for $215 in sixteen. Gross $320, fees $11.52, net +$308.48. Both fills landed on the ticket price.
Seven positions, eight contracts, six winners, one loss. Gross $705, fees $46.08, net +$658.92. The account went from $102,066.92 to $102,725.84.
Fees were 6.5% of gross. Two weeks ago on micros that figure was 20%. It is the single clearest thing the instrument change bought, and it shows up in a quiet week rather than a dramatic one.
The honest caveat on the win rate: six from seven is not a result, it is a small sample in a good week. The published three-year backtest runs at 84% across 492 trades and still contains a losing streak of three and a $3,134 drawdown. A week like this one is what that average looks like when it lands on the friendly side.
Context from last week, because one green week does not erase it. Friday 21 August was six trades and six losses, −$646.84, and it remains the largest single drawdown of the month. This week returned about the same amount again. The month stands at +$2,725.84 across 42 broker rows and 71.43% profitable.
Everything above can be checked rather than believed. The historical strikes stay on the chart in TradingView, and bar replay will walk you through any of them candle by candle.
Take the free week and check it yourselfResults shown are from a funded prop account executing in a simulated environment. Hypothetical or simulated performance results have certain limitations. Unlike an actual performance record, simulated results do not represent actual trading. Also, since the trades have not been executed, the results may have under- or over-compensated for the impact, if any, of certain market factors, such as lack of liquidity. Simulated trading programs in general are also subject to the fact that they are designed with the benefit of hindsight. No representation is being made that any account will or is likely to achieve profit or losses similar to those shown. Falcon is a trading tool and does not provide financial advice. Futures trading involves substantial risk of loss.