TradersBuys vs Sells: Why Your Results Can Depend on Direction
Plenty of traders are clearly better at one direction than the other. Split your results into buys and sells and you may find a bias you didn't know you had, plus a simple rule to deal with it.
Written By
Karolina Hansen
Key Takeaways
- One overall number can hide a big gap between your buys and your sells.
- The usual culprits are selling into a rising market (or buying into a falling one), having a fixed view on where price should go, and paying different swap on longs and shorts.
- Look at the win rate, the average result and how many trades sit on each side before you trust the total.
- You usually don't need to ban the weaker direction. A filter does the job, for example only taking it when the higher timeframe agrees.
Most journals give you one win rate and one profit figure. But a buy and a sell aren't mirror images. Markets trend. You have opinions about where gold is going, whether you admit it or not. Swap isn't the same both ways either. Split your trades into buys and sells and you'll often find one side making nearly all the money while the other slowly gives some of it back.
Why One Direction Can Outperform the Other
Fighting the trend
If the daily chart is going up, every sell is a counter-trend trade. Those can work, but there's less room for a sloppy entry.
A personal bias
If you've decided gold is heading to a new high, you'll keep finding buy setups, including some that aren't really there.
Overnight costs
Swap is different for longs and shorts, so holding one side overnight can cost you more than the other.
None of this makes one direction wrong. A buy and a sell are simply different trades with different odds, so measure them separately.
How to Read Your Own Split
The illustrative journal below shows a pattern that comes up a lot. The trader is up overall, and nearly all of it comes from the buys. The sells win less often and lose more.
Illustrative journal: buys vs sells
| Check | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Number of trades on each side | If one side only has a few trades, it can look extreme just by luck. |
| Win rate per side | Tells you whether you're picking the trades on that side well. |
| Average win and average loss per side | A low win rate can still make money if the winners are big enough. |
| When the trades happened | A bad side might all come from one month when the market only went one way. |
What to Do About It
Check the bigger picture
Before every trade in your weaker direction, write down whether the higher timeframe agrees with it.
Add one filter
Something like sells only when the daily chart is below its recent structure. Keep it simple enough that you can test it.
Consider smaller size
While you test the filter, you could trade the weaker side smaller instead of stopping it altogether.
Measure again
After a month, split the results again and see if the gap has closed at all.
Find out if one direction is doing all the work.
Open Your JournalFrequently Asked Questions
Not straight away. First check you've got enough trades and that the numbers aren't down to one or two outliers. Then try a filter that only lets you take the weaker direction when the bigger trend agrees. That's usually a better first move than a ban.
If you hold a position overnight you pay or receive swap, and the rate for a long is usually different from the rate for a short on the same instrument. You'll mostly notice it on trades you hold for several days.
There's no exact number. As a rough floor, I'd want a few dozen trades on each side, spread over more than one month, before acting on it.
Educational content only, not financial advice. Examples are illustrative. Trading involves risk, and past performance does not guarantee future results.
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