Looking back over the last 6 months of SA Watchlist trade ideas - H2:2025.
- Garth Mackenzie
- 7 days ago
- 5 min read
By Garth Mackenzie (22 January 2026)
113 trade ideas generated (105 triggered)
68% winners (71 trades)
24% losers (25 trades)
8% breakeven (9 trades)
Potential 117% return in 6 months based on 1:2 risk to reward assumption and 1% of capital risked per trade.
I’ve made it a habit to look back over all of my Friday SA Watchlist trade ideas every six months. Doing this allows me to review ideas that worked well, and ones that didn’t. It’s a useful process that I enjoy doing and I enjoy sharing the results transparently with you.
I’ve been doing these reviews every six months since the beginning of 2024. So I’m building up quite a strong set of data and can really see where my strengths and weaknesses lie. The idea, of course, is to try and lean into the strengths, and stay away from trade setups that have consistently delivered sub-optimal results.
I’ll share the lessons I’ve taken away from this shortly. But I must point out that these stats are the best 6-month figures since I began reviewing this data.
Previous reviews are here:
Every Friday, I scan through all the charts in my watchlist on the JSE and tease out the technical setups that are looking the most promising. 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 more 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 details of my past six months of trade ideas in the SA Watchlist, for the second half of 2025. Each trade is documented with a brief description of each idea.
A 68% win rate is pretty high by my standards. That’s around 2 out of every 3 trades as winners. After doing this review exercise four times since the start of 2024, these stats are pretty consistent with the previous times I’ve assessed the results of my SA Watchlist ideas. My long term hit rate with these ideas is basically 2/3.
If one makes a conservative assumption that you’d applied 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 142% of capital (71 winning trades x 2%) and your losers cost you 25% of capital (25 losers x -1%) for a net total return of 117% (excl costs and slippage).
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. I didn't achieve that kind of return myself, but this does remind me that I should take action on my own analysis more often :)
Looking back over past trades is always a good practice 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 50dma, 21ema and 8ema always added to the probability of success. This is a simple filter to apply to every trade.
Counter-trend trades had a far lower probability of success. Whilst it is always enticing to try and pick a bottom or a top, it is a low probability way to trade. Sure you may get some right, but over a big enough sample of trades, you’re unlikely to be consistently successful if you’re trading against established momentum. Rather trade with momentum at your back
Most winners took between 1 and 3 weeks to realise their targets, sometimes longer. The best trades usually start to work immediately and don’t look back, but you do need to run your winners and allow them time to breathe.
Very important that stop losses were executed to keep losses small. This is something we already know and I’ll continue to stress this for as long as I live.
In many cases, if a trade got stopped out and then quickly recovered back to recapture 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.
There were some clusters evident in the data. Some weeks saw almost all my trade ideas work, whereas some weeks saw almost all of them stopped out. This is not unusual in trading. What is really important is to ensure that your risk management is sharp when a losing cluster comes along. It’s important to cut losers quickly when they surpass a stop loss in order to avoid deep draw downs in your capital.
The 3-day-rule trade setup has become somewhat unreliable. Often a stock that got hammered for 3 consecutive days continued to fall after that, or just stayed depressed. There just doesn’t seem to be the appetite to snap up “broken bargains” anymore, like there used to be in the past. As such, I've become somewhat more cautious on 3-day-rule trade opportunities.
Here is a break down of every trade suggestion from July 2025 to end December 2025.
(Click to enlarge)
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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.
Happy trading
Garth Mackenzie
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