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9. Retrospectives

A position is a series of decisions: the first buy, each tranche added, each sale, and the thinking behind each one. Day to day, you see these one at a time. A retrospective lays them all out together, from the first buy to today or to the final sale, with your notes in among the trades in the order they happened.

Read that way, a position tells a story. Did the reasons you wrote at the first buy still hold when you added? Did the sale come for the reason you had said it would, or for another? Where did what you did depart from what you meant to do? These are the questions a retrospective is for. The answers are yours to draw; the retrospective puts the evidence in one place.

Opening a Retrospective​

In the current app, you reach a retrospective from Analytics → Risk / Reward: click a position's dot on the Allocation vs Return chart, which we met in section 6.5. Each retrospective covers one stock at one broker, across every round you have traded it.

What It Shows​

At the top is the stock and the broker, with where the position stands:

  • for a position you have closed, the realised profit or loss, in rupees and per cent, and how many days it was held,
  • for a position you hold, the quantity and the average cost.

Below is the price chart with every trade marked, as in Replay, which we met in Chapter 5. A switch changes the candles between daily, weekly and monthly.

Below the chart is the timeline: every trade and every note, in date order.

  • A trade shows its date, its type (BUY, ADD, TRIM or SELL), the quantity and price, and the basis: the average cost of the position after that trade.
  • A note shows its date, the mark NOTE, what you wrote and its hashtags.

Hover over a row, and the chart picks out that trade. Click a row to keep it picked out while you look.

Making Use of It​

A retrospective is only as full as the notes behind it. A position with no notes shows its trades alone, which tells you what happened but not why. This is where the habit from Chapter 7 pays back: notes written at the time, read together at the end.

Many investors look back at a position when they close it, while it is fresh. Others set aside a time each quarter to go through the positions closed in that quarter. Either way, a follow-up note under the last sale, as we saw in section 7.3, is a natural place to record what you take from it.

Summary​

In this chapter, we looked back at a position as a whole. We saw:

  • what a retrospective is for: reading a position's decisions together, with your reasons beside them,
  • how to open one from Risk / Reward,
  • the summary, the chart and the timeline of trades and notes,
  • and how notes written at the time make a retrospective worth reading.

This brings us to the end of looking back. In Chapter 10, we turn to the Playbook, where you write down how you mean to act from here on.