Here are various important details and technicalities about that "97 WINNERS Challenge":

• There were days were Pascal made several trades and others where he did not do any for days, weeks or months at a time (whether it was because he was on vacation for several weeks or because he decided to hold on to some positions).
  
  
• All profits made on each trade were added to the previous balance and the new total was available for the next trade.
  
  
• That challenge accounts for all the "complete" trades (meaning trades which were opened and closed during that period) made from December 7, 1998 up to December 7, 1999.
  
  
• Pascal's goal was to do that challenge for a full year so, as of December 7, 1999, he ended it and started to trade again based on different rules.
  
  
• To make that Challenge as "conservative" and as difficult as possible, Pascal decided to use an IRA account (retirement account) for that Challenge. 
  In an IRA account, your trading opportunities are REDUCED IN HALF as you can only go "LONG" (buy first and sell later). Even if the market is falling, you can not go "SHORT" (selling first and buying back later, hopefully at a lower price) because of legal restrictions. That limitation reduces of course tremendously your trading opportunities.  
  Also, IRA accounts do not allow you to trade on "margin" (meaning that you could use twice as much money as your actual capital) and that restriction also reduces your profits in 1/2 (if you make a 2% profit on a trade using only your own capital, your total profit is ... 2%; but if you make the same 2% profit on a trade where you used a fully margined account, you total profit on YOUR OWN CAPITAL will actually be 4%!).  So, in other words, had all those trades be made on a regular margin account (like most of Pascal's other accounts), the net % return would have been almost TWICE as much (after deducting the margin interest costs for trades held overnight).
  
  

• All % returns are measured on the price difference between the selling price and the buying price.
  

• As an average, Pascal used approximately 90% of his available capital to make each new trade.
  

• All trades and results are presented in "% RETURN" so that anyone can relate to them whether you are trading $10,000 or $1,000,000.
  

• Obviously, in order to reach that kind of performance, Pascal used absolutely EVERYTHING that he knew at that time (all of his trading knowledge and experience) and did not limit himself to only one or two techniques or concepts.  His "homework" in selecting all those trades was very extensive and many trading criteria had to be met in order for him to enter each trade.  
  It is also obvious that Pascal used a combination of Day Trading, Overnight Trading and traditional Investing techniques to achieve that result.
  
  
• The slight difference in % return between the two examples on $20,000 and $100,000 of starting capital is simply due to the lower incidence of the commission costs on each trade in the example with the greater starting capital.
  
  
• Only one decimal is displayed for most numbers on that listing but several decimals were used for all actual calculations; this explains why you could find some differences in the results being listed if you were to redo those calculations solely based on the one decimal numbers being displayed.
  

In the interest of being as realistic and as accurate as possible, the trades reported in that listing do NOT include the following:

• The proceeds of 2 long term positions on AAPL and NKE which had been opened prior to that challenge and which are therefore irrelevant to it.
  
• All deposits made on this account and which are regular SEP IRA deposits (based on Pascal MONMOINE's paychecks) .  One such example would be the deposit of $5,787.15 made on 11/10/99. 
  
• The interest and dividends received on this account during the time of that challenge which we decided not to include.
  
• A few trades which were made on "margin" due to an electronic error of Pascal's on-line broker (margin is not allowed on an IRA account) and which we decided not to include to be as conservative as possible.
  
• A few trades whose buying or selling price was split in 2 or 3 different prices (in such situation, the least favorable price was used and only one trade was reported making the 97 count lower than the actual count).
  
• One trade on 2 shares of the stock MKTW which was entered by mistake (but which still resulted in a % profit before commissions); Pascal would never intentionally trade just 2 shares of a $67 stock.
  
• As you will understand from reading the details mentioned here above, it could not have been accurate to represent the "total net % return" on that account by simply taking the beginning and the ending balances of that account.  So in order to be able to present a realistic approximation of the "TOTAL NET % RETURN" which those trades would have produced if they had been applied to a pre defined starting capital, we calculated for you on the enclosed spreadsheet two separate examples.  
  The first one shows the progression of those trades if they had been applied to a $20,000 starting capital and the second one if they had been applied to a starting capital of $100,000 so that traders and investors with various amounts of capital will be able to better relate to that performance.  
  The "Cumulative % Return" column represents the NET % RETURN generated AFTER COMMISSIONS by each trade, considering that each new trade would have used only 90% (which is very realistic for this kind of trading) of the available capital from the previous trade.
  A commission rate of $9.99 per trade ($19.98 for each BUY/SELL) was deducted from those calculations as it is the actual commission rate which Pascal was charged.