How might you take this further? Some ideas...

The simple little DB we have constructed will, I think you'll agree, do at least as good a job of showing our strengths and weaknesses as most spreadsheet driven record keeping solutions. The bulk of the hard work is already done, come what may! There are, however, any number of relatively simple things that can be done to enhance the task, and to enhance the presentation of our records. The purpose of this post is really to act as a sort of thinktank for you, so you can experiment further and personalise your database.

Let's say you're developing a killer strat or two, but are paper trading it. You obvioulsy would want to record the results, but wouldn't want the stakes and profit / loss to appear in your 'proper' trading record. On a spreadsheet you'd probably do this on a separate sheet, but with the database approach it's a doddle to incorporate such a feature whilst changing very little, and using the existing file structure. Simply insert a new field in the Trades table, with the name Paper or similar and make the datatype 'Yes/No' with 'No' as the default value. It's then simply a case of dropping the new field onto the Trades Form and incorporating it in the qryTradesBase - as another parameter as we did with the dates. Nothing else need be changed!

It's all very well being able to limit the selection of trades by date, but unfortunately, as it stands at the moment, there is no way of incorporating the chosen dates into the title bar of the reports produced. As far as I am aware there is no way of capturing such information from within the main Access application itself, but with a little bit of Visual Basic for Applications you might come up with a control form similar to the one I've mocked up below:

The code to make this work is actually surprisingly easy to develop, and again a little bit of reading around the subject and trial and error is the way to go.

You might want to explore a deeper nesting of information. If you trade predominately one sport, and, unsurprisingly, football is a good example, you might like to see how various strategies perform in different leagues, or in friendlies, cup games or tournaments. With a little bit of imagination most things are possible, and whilst it can be extremely frustrating, working out how to do something new is actually quite good fun and I'm sure is also good for your karma!