Looking back over the last 6 months of SA Watchlist trade ideas - H1:2025.

By Garth Mackenzie (7 July 2025)

116 trade ideas generated (98 triggered)

61% winners

27% losers

12% breakeven

Potential 93% return in 6 months based on 1:2 risk to reward assumption

It’s always useful to look back on past trade ideas - both winners and losers – and to review those trades to learn what we’re doing right and what we’re doing wrong.

Every 6 months, I take a look back over the SA Watchlist ideas that I publish for TradersCorner subscribers each Friday.

Every Friday, I scan through all the charts in my watchlist on the JSE and to tease out the technical setups that are looking the best. These are then placed onto a focus list to monitor for potential trade opportunities based on the technical strategy suggested.

These are unbiased analyses and can be either long or short.

I usually publish a list of 5 or 6 stock trading ideas to monitor each Friday.

Those of you who know me and have followed my work for a long time will know that I like to keep things real and don’t make trading out to be more glamorous than it actually is. Being honest about past successes and failures is an important part of building trust.

With that in mind, I share below the stats of my past six months of trade ideas in the SA Watchlist, for the first half of 2025. Each trade is documented with a brief description of each idea.

Since the beginning of January 2025, I’ve published 116 trade ideas in the SA Wacthlist.

• Of those, 98 met the criteria to initiate a trade entry.

• 60 of those resulted in wins with the price targets being met (61%)

• 27 of those were stopped out for a defined loss (27%)

• 11 closed for a breakeven after initially working but then failing to reach the target (12%)

• The remainder (18 ideas) either didn’t meet the criteria to enter a trade or their results have not been concluded yet.

A 61% win rate is pretty decent by my standards. That’s around 2 out of every 3 trades as winners. After doing this exercise three times since the start of 2024, these stats are pretty consistent with the previous times I’ve reviewed the results of my SA Watchlist ideas.

If one makes a conservative assumption that you’d allowed a capital risk of 1% on each of these trade ideas, and that the winners all generated a 2:1 reward to risk ratio (many were better than that), then it means that your winners made 120% of capital and your losers cost you 27% of capital for a net total return of 93%.

This is theoretical of course. I don’t like the type of marketing that splashes these kinds of numbers across the headline because in reality it’s never as easy to achieve these types of figures as what hindsight might suggest. But these are the numbers based on back testing of the past 6 months’ worth of discretionary trading ideas published here each week.

Looking back over past trades is always a good practise and should be done by all traders periodically as part of a process of learning and improving.

In that respect, I made some useful observations when looking back over the past 6 months of SA Watchlist ideas:

• Waiting for breakouts to confirm was important. Pre-empting breakouts often resulted in a bad outcome. Also being on the right side of the 5ema always added to the probability of success. This is a simple filter to apply to every trade.

• Very important that stop losses were executed to keep losses small. This is something we already know.

• Winners often needed time to achieve their targets. Up to 2-3 weeks or longer in some cases. We need to be patient with winners and not snatch at profits too quickly. (Easier said than done)

• In many cases, if a trade got stopped out and then quickly recovered back to revalidate the entry level, those trades went on to work well. It’s often a good idea to re-enter a trade that gets stopped out and then re-validates. It means the thinking was right, but the timing was wrong. Give these situations a second chance. (An example of this was the BLU long trade on 21 March that was stopped out and then recovered).

• I nailed some short calls nicely in March and early April 2025.

• In early April, I did well to zoom out and take a look at big levels on weekly charts. I managed to identify some great buying opportunities in April and if you’d taken the suggested trades and held them, the following few weeks will have made big returns (CLS, FSR, KST, NED, SBK, NRP were all big winners identified off weekly charts in early April). These trade ideas all delivered many multiples more than a 2R return.

• There were clusters evident in the data. Clusters of several winners in a row, and clusters where a number of losses occurred consecutively. This happens in trading and is where risk management is so important. It’s also important to dig deep, stick to the process, and not get despondent when a bad cluster happens.

Here's a detailed breakdown of all the trades suggested since January 2025.

As a reminder, this is what you get as a subscriber to Traders Corner for £19.90 per month on an auto-renew subscription:

A Daily Desk Journal report each day with video analysis on the SA Top40 future, S&P500 and other actionable trade ideas when they appear.

You get a chat forum to ask questions and chat with other traders as well as myself.

Once a week you get an SA Watchlist of JSE stocks setting up for potential trades.

Once a week you get an International Watchlist of US stocks setting up for potential trades.

Once a month, an update of the “Stocks in the Vault” long term share portfolio.

Once you’re subscribed, there is no lock-in. You can cancel your subscription at any time.

Obviously past performance is no guarantee of future performance. But what I can guarantee is that I’ll keep looking for high probability trade setups, and publish them for subscribers when I see them.

Try a 7 day free trial to get a taste.

Happy trading

Garth Mackenzie

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