Procedures Manual
Table of Contents
Procedures Manual
A career as a military helicopter pilot. Effective command of an S-70A-9 Black Hawk requires the use of checklists for all standard routines and procedures, in order to minimize the likelihood of error, and ensure maximum “brain space” available for mission management and maintenance of situational awareness.
Trading is the same. Consistent use of your checklists will minimize the likelihood of procedural error.
Plus, as you become more familiar with your checklists these procedures will require less conscious attention, allowing greater focus on price action in order to remain in sync with the shifting forces of supply and demand.
Trading success requires consistent and disciplined application of our trading plan. The best way I know of to turn your plan into disciplined and consistent actions, is to create a checklist of procedures you will follow in applying your plan.
Our checklist is documented in a procedures manual.
Sample Procedures Manual
The remainder of this chapter provides a sample procedures manual.
PLEASE NOTE: This is just an example. Consider using it as a template for creation of your own procedures manual, amending as required to suit your own circumstances and needs.
The procedures manual contains the following sections:
- Trading Plan Summary Details
- Emergency Contacts
- Screen Setups
- Routines
- Pre-Session
- During Session
- Post-Session
- Contingency Management
- Action Affirmation (AA) Statements
- Longer Term Reviews
In most cases, the procedures have already been discussed in previous sections of the course articles, and will therefore create some duplication in content. However, they’ve been reproduced here in full in order to demonstrate the format and content of our procedures manual.
The procedures manual is quite detailed, and constantly referring to the manual can be quite distracting (I find that anyway!!). Please persevere though while you’re first learning. As you gain experience, the intent is that you won’t need to refer to these procedures for every step – they’ll become habit.
In time, you’ll probably be able to operate with a 1-page summary checklist. Eventually they’ll become internalized and you can trade without reference to any document.