A checklist before your first trading day

Most of what goes wrong in the first week of an evaluation is not a trading problem. It is a setup problem that only announces itself once there is money on the line. The list below takes a quarter of an hour and removes most of them.

1. 1Confirm which stage your account is in, and read that stage's limits rather than the model's headline ones.
2. 2Find the broker's day boundary and write it down in your own timezone.
3. 3Check which instruments are available to you, and at what sizes.
4. 4Place one minimum-size trade to confirm the platform, the login and the fill behave as expected.
5. 5Decide the maximum number of losing trades you will take in one session, before the session.
6. 6Know where the live loss figures appear on the account screen, so you are not hunting for them under pressure.

The one most people skip

It is the fourth. A single small trade placed deliberately, with no expectation of profit, is the cheapest test available of every assumption in the list above it. Traders who skip it tend to discover a platform or sizing surprise during a position they actually care about.

Nothing on the list is about strategy, and that is the point. The strategy is the part you brought with you. The rest is making sure the environment does not take the decision out of your hands.