Well Happy New year to everyone! I hope it was a great break for your but now its time to get back to work and today we're going to talk about new strategies for the new year. It is at this point where many investors tend to think of how great the new year will be and the goals they want to achieve. One of those goals is usually to find or test a new strategy and measure its effectiveness.

While many of us have a go to strategy or process that helps us find the products or companies we want to trade, one should always be on the lookout for anything else that may give you that extra edge. The problem is when to implement this new approach. What better time than the beginning of the year. This would allow you to measure your results at the end of the quarter, half year, and full year marks.

So if you are going to start a new strategy here are a few things you may want to consider:

Win / Loss: Is your strategy based on wins and losses? You may think, of course it is what else would it be based on? Well. sometimes we just like to measure our entry points or our take profit points and were not really testing out a new strategy. If you are testing a new strategy then certainly a win/loss ratio is in order. This can be as complicated as a spreadsheet, or as simple as writing a "w" or "l" on a piece of paper and adding them up in the future. Either way be sure to save this information to know your results in the future.

Simulate the strategy?: Rather than manually track a new strategy many investors will let it all play out in a simulator. Almost every platform on the planet allows its customers to utilize a free simulator to test strategies. This is a great way to test swing trading and investing strategies as you are not concerned with exact entry prices so much. For day traders it is a little more tough to test strategies on a simulator.

Automate and back test?: Of course you can skip all this if you have the ability to automate a strategy and then run historical "what if" scenarios to measure success or failure. Even though this can be easily done, you still may want to have a forward looking test to measure your strategy in the future. If so you can still automate it and then look at the results on your specified time periods.

In any case the new year is a great time to be looking at new ideas. From stop loss points, to trailing stops, to completely new strategies, let the new year let your mind run wild and enjoy the possibilities.