Performance Analysis

How elite performers use data to improve

We know that updating your trading approach to try and keep up with market trends can be a complex, time-consuming process. Our Performance Analytics tool gives you detailed insights into your trading behaviour and helps you unlock the potential of your trading strategy.

No matter your industry or profession, it’s likely that you follow the principle – ‘evaluating your own performance is crucial to success’. This also rings true in the world of trading. Non-traders may sometimes have the perception that successful traders only ever have profitable trades. The reality is that the markets aren’t that forgiving. Traders are constantly studying market trends and developing new strategies, but not many are taking the time to identify the factors beneath their approach. Factors that may explain why their previous strategies are no longer profitable. While traders of the past may have relied more on opinions and intuition, modern traders are now realising that analytics tells us a more complete story. “Trading can be about opinions and hunches, but long-term success is about taking learnings from data and analytics,” says Giles Watts, SVP & Regional Business Director, UK & EU.

City Index’s exclusive Performance Analytics tool helps you refine your strategy by monitoring the performance of your trades. This means you can keep track of your profit-loss ratio, assess your trading habits and discover your most successful markets.

“We’ve done something quite novel at City Index that nobody else is doing… we can take a portfolio of your trades and eliminate all the noise”, explains Ann Hunt, CEO, Chasing Returns. “Traders are human. Moments of ill-discipline happen. Performance Analytics helps traders identify those situations and give them a nudge. This means you can recover quicker from an emotional state and get back on track.”

Understanding performance analysis

Our tool helps you rethink your trading approach with regular data-driven reviews. Giles stresses the importance of taking research and data and “applying this with discipline” to the way you trade. By reading through reviews of your trades on a daily, weekly or monthly basis, you can identify specific areas of your trading behaviours to develop – and then track your progress with metrics. You no longer have to review and track your trades individually.

“We do all that for you,” Ann explains. “You don’t have to go into a spreadsheet and type in 20 trades at the end of a long day. The trading journal and edges are there for you, so you get to spend your review time actually adding value to your trades.”

You may uncover that you’ve historically lost trades when you attempt another after winning three in a row. With Performance Analytics, you can set an alert so that our platform will warn you when you have three consecutive winning trades. This helps you stay objective and remove emotion from your trades.

The financial markets are not alone in evaluating performances with data analytics. It has also been adopted by professional sports, as even elite-level coaches can’t rely on match footage or training sessions to completely gauge a player’s performance. Saracens coaches use data to objectively assess their team and find opportunities to exploit in their competition. “By looking at the data you can hone in on areas in which you need to improve on, but you can also see how you’re excelling compared to your peers, which is why the data can be so important to the players”, says Saracens Strength & Conditioning Coach, Liam O’Hara. 

Performance Analytics offers data-driven insights that answers questions you haven’t yet asked about your trading performance – how do you perform in your opening trade of the day? What would your profit and loss look like if you removed anomalous trades? Do you perform worse after one loss?

Discover your personalised answers to these questions and more with Performance Analytics – open an account today to get started.