Pre-Trade Checklist

A pre-trade checklist is a short, fixed list of conditions a trader confirms before sending an order: the setup criteria, the position size implied by the stop distance, where the stop and target sit, any scheduled economic releases, and current exposure across correlated pairs. Its purpose is not to predict the outcome but to make the process repeatable, so the same standard applies to a trade taken calmly and one taken under pressure. Because the trading checklist is written before the market is live, it also becomes a record that a later review can measure the decision against. Checklists tend to be most useful when they are short enough to complete every single time, rather than exhaustive.