Step 1 of 4
Why a routine matters
The first trade of the day sets the tone. If you open the platform and react to the first candle, you trade the market’s mood instead of your plan. A short, fixed routine moves the important decisions to a calm moment, before money is at risk.
Keep it under ten minutes. A routine you skip on busy days is worse than a short one you always do.
Think of a pilot’s checklist. Pilots do not use it because they forget how to fly; they use it because one missed item is expensive. Your account works the same way: one forgotten news release or one open position you did not notice can cost more than a month of good trades.
Step 2 of 4
The checklist
- Limits in dollars. Your daily loss limit is measured from the previous end-of-day closed balance and resets at 17:00 New York time. On a $10,000 1-Step account that closed yesterday at $10,000, today’s floor is $9,500. Write the number down.
- Maximum-loss floor. Note where it sits today. On a trailing account it may have moved up since last week.
- News. List the day’s high-impact releases and their times in your time zone. On the 1-Step, 2-Step and Instant Funded, opening new FX and metals positions is blocked from 2 minutes before to 2 minutes after high-impact news unless you bought the News Trading add-on.
- Open risk. Any positions from yesterday? Their open loss already counts toward today’s limit.
- Plan. Two or three levels or setups you plan to trade, with entry, stop and size decided in advance.
- Stop rule. Your maximum number of trades and your personal daily stop, for example half the daily limit.
Step 3 of 4
Checking the plan against the rules
Before the session, run each planned trade through one question: if the stop hits, how much of each limit is left? The MyFundedCapital Terminal shows the loss at your stop and what is left of the daily and overall limits in the order ticket, so you can answer it in seconds.
If two planned trades could both lose on the same news, count them as one bigger trade. Correlated positions are the quiet way traders exceed their own risk plan.
On Fridays, add one more check: holding a position over the weekend needs the Weekend Holding add-on. Without it, plan to be flat before the session ends.
Step 4 of 4
After the session
The routine has a second half that takes two minutes:
- One line on what you did well.
- One line on any rule you bent, and why.
- Tomorrow’s first note: a level to watch or a news event to avoid.
These lines feed your trading journal and the weekly review. Over a month they show you which part of the routine actually protects your account.
If you broke a rule, write which item on the checklist would have caught it. If none would, add one. That is how the checklist grows from your own mistakes instead of a generic template.
Recap
- Write today’s daily floor in dollars before you look at a chart.
- Mark high-impact news times; the 1-Step, 2-Step and Instant Funded have a news window.
- Decide your maximum number of trades and your personal stop before the open.
Check yourself
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Nice work. … of 5 lessons in Psychology & routine done.
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