The Review Process

A critical component to our trade plan is the review process. Let’s face it, we’ll never improve at anything unless we know what to change. The other key benefit to a comprehensive review process is how it increases our confidence in our strategies. 

Review starts with documentation. You’ll capture several data points for every trade the strategy teed up regardless of whether you took the trade or not. 

Here’s the data we capture for our futures day-trading team. 

1. Date, Day of week, Catalyst(s) (news, earnings, etc.).

2. Overnight range, Expected day session range. 

3. Inside/Outside day, daily pivots, hourly trend, daily trend.

4. Average True Range, day session range, ATR targets up/down, supply/demand levels, volume profile levels. 

5. Trade data: taken or not?, time in, time out, entry price, stop loss, target(s), risk/reward, Maximum Favorable and Adverse Excursion, result. (Note: if you use other technical indicators like RSI, moving averages, etc., their values would be input based on the entry time of the trade). 

6. Journal: Compare your result with the strategy ruleset results, note differences, and describe why they happened. Note your mood and feelings with attention on your positivity, focus, confidence, and discipline. 

We use a spreadsheet for data capture so we can easily mine the data for improvements in the strategy rules and our own behavior! It may seem daunting and even boring to capture this data but through repetition you’ll shorten the time it takes and more importantly have objective answers for improvement. 

Our trading teams focus on multiple strategies for day trading futures and high-probability candidates for swing trading options. You can learn either or both risk-free. Join us.

To your trading success,

Mike Siewruk

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