Lucas Beat the Best article the other day seems to have generated a fair bit of discussion around the traps regarding how many trades one should have made by this stage of the game much of which, in turn, has brought on a bad case of nerves on my part, 7 rounds in and 6 trades down.

A prevailing thought Ive come across is that by trading hard early, those who are near the top of the rankings are selling themselves into trouble later on in the season as injuries kick in and trades are getting thin on the ground and, on the flip side, people who havent traded yet are wasting opportunities to cash in.

This got me wondering, speculation and perception aside, is it a winning strategy to conserve trades or has history favoured the bold?

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Buster Gonads and Blue thunder most helpfully for my purposes, wrote down the stories of their seasons <a href="http://tooserious.net/2009-review-year-of-the-gonad-go-you-good-thing#comments">here [/url]and <a href="http://yscc.com.au/blog/archives/2011preseason/the-year-of-blue-thunder/">here[/url]. Ive pulled out their trades and broken it down so not only can we see how many trades they made and when but we can see them as a % of total trades throughout the year for the purpose of being able to directly relate the figures to this year.

<a href="http://tooserious.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Trade-history2.png"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-3026" title="Trade history" src="http://tooserious.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Trade-history2.png" alt="" width="429" height="490" />[/url]

For those not interested in doing the math, this year with 24 trades at our disposal-
7 trades = 29%, 6 trades = 25% and 5 trades = 21% which means even with Impromptus trade like a fiend philosophy, hes still had 6% less trades than Blue Thunder last year at this point.

I just thought itd be good to throw it out there in terms of helping to plan trades and to help judge how were all running now. So where are you sitting? Are you trading hard now to get the long term benefit or are you holding back to cover the inevitable injury doughnuts at the end of the season?