A Trading Routine You Can Repeat

A routine is not a productivity habit. It is the mechanism that moves decisions out of the session, where you are least equipped to make them, and into the time before it, where you are. Everything the previous two lessons argued for — rules that block a bias, limits set in advance — has to live somewhere, and this is where.

Before: the checklist

Fifteen to thirty minutes, before the first chart, in the same order every time. The order matters as much as the contents: it puts context before opportunity, so you decide what you are looking for before seeing anything that might tempt you.

Step 1 is not a formality and it is the one people skip. A trader who is exhausted or distracted has a lower bar for a setup and less resistance to breaking a rule, and both of those are much easier to notice before the session than during it.

During: decisions already made

The session should contain as few decisions as possible. Ideally two: is this the setup I wrote down, and has the trigger happened.

What belongs in the session

• Watching the levels you marked, on the timeframes you fixed.
• Checking a candidate against the written setup, one item at a time.
• Placing the order with stop and target attached, at the size the formula gives.
• Recording the trade and its reason, now, before the outcome is known.
• Managing open trades by their written rules and by nothing else.

What does not

• Changing the size because this one feels better.
• Looking at a timeframe you did not plan to look at.
• Reading news to decide whether to hold, unless the rules say to.
• Recalculating the P/L. It is a distraction from the chart and an invitation to trade the number.
• Reconsidering the strategy. That happens in the weekly review, with a sample, not mid-session with two trades.

If a genuinely new situation arises that the rules do not cover — and occasionally one will — the default is to stand aside and write it down for the review. A rule invented mid-session, under pressure, with a position open, is not a rule.

After: closing the session

Sessions should end at a time, not at exhaustion or at a number. A session that ends when you are tired ends with your worst trades in it.

1. Stop at the planned hour — or at the daily limit, whichever comes first.
2. Record every trade, including the ones you considered and did not take. The skipped ones are data about your filter.
3. Write one line on execution: did I follow the rules? Where did I not?
4. Note one thing for tomorrow. One, not a list.
5. Close the platform. The session is over when the software is shut, not when you stop looking.

Point 2 is worth more than it sounds. A journal of taken trades measures your strategy; a journal that also holds the setups you passed on measures you — and the gap between the two is usually where a struggling trader's actual problem is.

Surviving a bad week

Routines are easy in a good week and are not for good weeks. The test is whether the checklist still gets done on the fourth losing day, and the honest answer for most traders is that it does not — which is when the losses stop being ordinary.

Three things to hold on to

1. A bad week is a sample of 2 to 20 trades. Track 5's streak arithmetic says a run of six losses is expected, not exceptional. Nothing has been learned yet.
2. Shorten the routine rather than dropping it. Five minutes of checklist beats none, and the point is that the sequence survives.
3. Reduce size if you need to, by the rule from Track 5's last lesson — halve it — rather than by stopping, which is harder to start again from.

The routine's real function only becomes visible in these weeks. In a good week it looks like unnecessary structure around decisions that were going fine. In a bad one it is the thing standing between a normal drawdown and the afternoon that costs the account — and it cannot be installed at that point, which is why it is built when nothing is wrong.