The Process

Three years ago I got fascinated with discretionary trading, mainly with trying to optimize the process and make it as consistent as possible.

As I experimented with sim trading real markets, I realized that a big part of it was risk management and systemizing the way I traded so I could be as rational as possible.

Initially, I thought writing down trades and tracking my P&L would be effective, so I downloaded a free trading journal. After a couple of months, I realized all I was doing was recording the same mistakes.

The P&L told me nothing that I didn't already know. Even though I had an extensive amount of screenshots, I could never really connect the thought process to the result.

So I started building my own trading journal. It started as a trading journal, but as I actually used it and iterated on different parts of it, it became much more. Fast forward a year, and I had a full system.

1. Session Dashboard

• Pre-Market Plans - Plan session ideas, track levels, track economic events.

• Trade Theses — No Thesis, No Trade

• Trade Executions - Full process record on your executions.

• Post-Market Reviews - Review your session. What worked well, what didn't, what you learned, what ideas you may have came across. --> Create concepts or research off of these reviews.

• Implementations — Changes you want to make and continuously be aware of.

2. Analysis Dashboard

• Various analysis databases focused on different parts of the process.

• Analyze the process, not the numbers.

3. Research & Strategy

• Concepts - Create notes with details on concepts for every aspect of trading.

• Research - Create notes to expand on ideas or concepts and gather your thoughts on it.

• Strategies — Create strategies from the concepts and research you've developed.

• Playbooks — Apply risk management and practical rules to your strategies.

• Implementations — Fix issues and mistakes in your trading.

Each dashboard is a different part of the process. The Session Dashboard is where the input data comes from. Through reviews and analysis, you start figuring out mistakes, patterns, and concepts to add to your system.

The Research & Strategy Dashboard is where you develop those concepts into specific strategies and apply them through playbooks. Analysis helps surface what works and what doesn't, while also making it easier to sort through and understand that data.

Everything feeds back into Research & Strategy, where you continue building and refining your trading.

The powerful part of it is the iteration.

The goal of the system is to follow a specific process, record data, review it, fix mistakes, and build a system around your trading.