In my opinion the „Account Performance“ tool is counting a wrong number of trades. So all derived values like averages and percentages are wrong and therefore useless.
NT obviously is counting the number of executions or something else, but not the number of trades. If e.g. in a fast market I order 10 contracts of any future contract and the order gets executed at 5 different price levels due to market action (e.g. 2 contracts at a time at 5 different price levels), NT will display 5 trades instead of 1 trade.
But this is definitely only one trade. A trader wants to order a certain number of contracts/stocks etc. at a time and has no influence on the kind of execution at the exchange. So if the trade doesn’t get executed at once but in pieces, NT shows a wrong number - from a couple of more trades to a multiple of trades over a period of time.
Today e.g. I made 3 dummy-trades and NT displays 10 trades in the summary tab, 14 executions and 7 orders?! For a past period of time I had hundreds of trades, though I make only a couple of trades per day.
To resolve this, I would suggest the following: At the start a trader has no position (flat). When he orders a certain number of contracts/shares, he has a position until he closes the position (flat again). This is one trade.
If a trader reverses a position, this would be a new trade, since he decides to change the original direction of the trade.
If a trader scales in or out (buys additional contracts/shares or sells them) and still has a position in the original direction, this would still be only one trade.
The "Position"-column in the "Executions"-tab works just like this. One has just to count the flat signs (-) (3 in this case).
From this point of view the original reason and the direction of the trade define the number of trades. The number of executions at the exchange, that one can’t influence anyway, plays no role.
To have an “Account Performance Tool” is very useful for a lot of reasons you all already know. But it is useless, until it displays the right numbers.
I added a couple of screensshots to try to make things clearer.
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