The boring checklist

People ask what a systematic trading week looks like. Here it is, unedited. The most honest thing about it is how little there is.

Monday–Friday, morning. Check overnight positions. Confirm every strategy and alert is running. If a webhook fired, verify the fill matches the signal. Time: 10–15 minutes. Number of decisions: zero.

Then: not trading. Surf, errands, life. The systems don't need a witness. This is the line people struggle with most, and it's the whole point — presence adds nothing except the temptation to interfere.

Afternoon. One longer look: what fired, what's queued, how each account sits against its drawdown limit. If everything matches the plan, close the laptop. Most days everything matches the plan.

Friday. Log the week. Wins, losses, and — most importantly — interventions. The target number of interventions is zero. A week where I touched nothing is a good week, even if it's red. A red week inside the rules is variance. A green week outside the rules is a debt.

Weekend. Nothing. The futures systems are flat by end of day anyway; the forex side runs its fixed stops and targets without me.

That's it. No morning watchlist ritual, no session replays, no screenshots of missed moves. If a rule can't be written down, it isn't a rule — it's a mood, and moods don't get screen time anymore.

Last quarter this checklist — about an hour of attention a day — sat on top of twelve out of twelve profitable compositions. The boring parts aren't the price of the results. They're the mechanism.

The full story of how I got here is in Why I stopped trading manually. The strategies and the ready-made compositions per account size are on the portfolios page.

Performance figures are a combination of live-tracked and modeled results. Past performance does not guarantee future results. Not financial advice.