about

Birch Street Journal is a place for me to document my discretionary trades and in the process:

  • learn to think about how to manage opportunities and risks
  • record keeping of winners vs lossers
  • sharing with family/ friends for feedback and new trade ideas

All the trades done here uses simple OHLC data that’s freely and publicly available1. I use a simple charting tool2 and trade manually on the Canadian discount brokerage Questrade.

The journal is an experiment to test the effectiveness of my strategies3 with simple risk management4. Only a few hours per week are spent5 using “risk capital” that’s funded entirely with personal savings6.

why birch street?

in addition to being a former Jane Street employee, John was also a former residence on Vancouver’s Birch Street which was a place of personal significance. He also keep a personal blog where he writes about other things of personal interest.

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Footnotes

  1. Open-High-Low-Close data are usually available from the broker or publically with Yahoo Finance; the yfinance python package is my personal tool of choice for programmatic data access.↩︎

  2. a self written Streamlit tool which can be easily replaced with a free TradingView account↩︎

  3. very simple and almost exclusively based on technical indicators↩︎

  4. each position has a stop order in place and each position have less than 0.5% of total bankroll at stake.↩︎

  5. I look mainly at the daily and weekly charts. Day-trading is not for me, this is a sustainable side hobby while I have a full-time career as a Data Scientist. On a busy week maybe I’ll do 2 to 5 trades, most week I do nothing but manage opened positions.↩︎

  6. I transfer about 15% of my income each month and mostly use that as “risk capital” to put on new trades. A large portion of the portfolio is invested in highly liquid Cash ETFs. I might enter a trade on margin but will then usually liquidate enough Cash ETFs to fully fund the position afterwards.↩︎