Pre-trade checklist
Pilots with 20,000 hours still run the checklist. The trades that kill accounts are the ones that would have failed it.
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The Practice Arena opens this exact setup on live prices with a virtual $10,000 account — same coin, same direction, same stop, same target — run the checklist, then take the trade for free. Every position you close is written into your journal, so the number you learn from is your own.
live prices · virtual money
Why each item is on the list
State — tired, angry or chasing a loss, your win rate quietly drops; the market will still be there tomorrow. Playbook — if you can't name the setup, it's an impulse, not a trade. Risk 1% — the position size calculator makes this a 10-second check that decides your survival odds. Stop placed first — a "mental stop" is a promise your future, losing self won't keep. 1:2 minimum — check it in the risk/reward planner; below 1:2 your plan silently demands elite accuracy. Funding & news — funding eats slow trades, news eats tight stops.
Green streak growing? Log the result of each trade in the trading journal — the checklist keeps you disciplined going in, the journal proves whether the discipline is paying.
One trade, run through all six checks
A worked example, so the list stops being abstract. The idea: a long on Bitcoin at $60,000 after a pullback into a 4-hour support zone, with the RSI back above its averages. The account is $10,000.
- State. Rested, no loss earlier in the day, not trying to win anything back. Pass.
- Playbook. The setup has a name you could write in one line: “pullback to 4h support, momentum resetting.” Pass. If the honest name were “it looked like it was going up,” this is where the trade ends.
- Risk 1%. $100. With the stop at $58,800 — 2% below entry, under the zone — the position is $100 ÷ 2% = $5,000 of Bitcoin, about 0.083 BTC. Pass.
- Stop placed first. The stop goes in with the order, not “later if it turns.” Pass.
- 1:2 minimum. Target $62,400, the last swing high: $2,400 of reward against $1,200 of risk per coin — exactly 1:2. Pass, just.
- Funding & news. Funding at +0.01% per 8 hours costs $0.50 per interval on $5,000 — about $3 over a two-day hold, irrelevant. But a US inflation print is due in three hours, and a 2% stop sits well inside the size of a typical news candle. Fail.
Five of six is not a pass. The useful verdict here is not “skip the trade” but “not yet”: wait for the release, let the candle close, and run the six checks again on whatever the chart shows then. Most traders remember the trades the checklist stopped as missed profits; the journal usually shows they were the news spikes that would have taken the stop.
What the checklist cannot do
It cannot tell you whether the setup is any good — a badly read chart passes all six checks as easily as a well read one. That part comes from the lessons on support and resistance and multi-timeframe analysis, and from the record in your journal. What it does reliably is remove the losses that had nothing to do with the chart: the tired trade, the revenge trade, the trade with no stop.