Every morning, before the market opens, I adhere to the following checklist. Steve Ward conveys the importance of this process best with a hypothetical scenario in High Performance Trading:
"Imagine you are sitting on a plane waiting to take off and fly to some beautiful holiday destination. As you are sitting there you see what appears to be the pilot rush on board. You overhear him explaining to one of the air stewards that he feels awful, having overslept due to not going to bed till a few hours ago. In order to keep to the flight schedule he will, he yawns, be skipping the pre-flight checks, and just get going. How do you feel? Does the pilot’s apparent lack of preparation worry you? If so, why?”
The Checklist
This is the minimum viable checklist — this accounts for an hour workout at the gym before this pre-trading routing. On days where I return home from the gym sooner, we extend the pre-market analysis longer than 45 minutes.
Time | Duration | Process |
4:15 am | N/A | Wake up |
5:10 am | 60 min | Exercise at the gym |
6:25 am | 5 min | Eat breakfast & consume minimal amounts of caffeine |
6:30 am | 45 min | Pre-Market Analysis — searching for trades & formulating hypotheses |
7:15 am | 5 min | Meditation → Mental trade simulations |
7:20 am | 10 min | Meditation → Empty thoughts & practicing mindfulness |
“You only need to see the casual gym goer perform their quick leg shake and arm jiggle to know that all they really want to do is get on some machine and start ‘exercising’, just as in the same way the average trader only wants to get in front of the screen and get involved in the market.”