How A Checklist And Edgewonk Can Save Your Trading

Checklist are used in different professions to standardize procedures and to minimize the potential for errors. When someone is doing the same task repeatedly, it’s easy to get sloppy or not give it the seriousness it deserves when you believe that you know how to do it anyway.

Trading is the ideal field for utilizing checklists because traders repeat the same things over and over again. Especially if you are a technical trader, you are usually trading the same patterns and following identical rules and signals for each trade.

A trading checklist usually lists all the signals or the criteria that you require before you can enter a trade. It’s also a good practice to start writing down the criteria and if you notice that you are not really clear about your rules and what defines a trade entry, then maybe you don’t know your system as well as you thought. Back to the drawing board!

Once you have a checklist ready, you use it in your everyday trading. You place the checklist next to you and when you are about to enter a trade, you go through the points one by one to check them off.

“I review my checklist. It’s a handwritten sheet laminated in plastic and taped to the right-hand corner of my desk where I can’t overlook it.” – Marty Schwartz

In the beginning, a checklist can, thus, help you become more aware of your trading and help you stay on track and not miss critical things. And when you are more experienced, a checklist can be helpful because it forces you to be aware of your actions and to eally think about the trade you are about to take.

Checklists in with Custom Statistics Edgewonk

In Edgewonk you can use the different journaling features to keep track of the quality of your trades and how well you respected the rules on your checklist. Such an approach will then help you further understand your trading, where you might need to work a little on your approach and what works well. And, you might even be able to see which signals work the best for you.

Here are a few approaches how you can track checklists and signals in Edgewonk:

1. General comments

If you don’t want to get into the details, you could just set up some entry comments and then tag your trades based on those. Entry comments could look like:

* I am using the term ‘signals’ interchangeably with the individual points on your checklist.

2. Custom Statistics

The Custom Statistics in Edgewonk is a powerful tagging mechanism and there are multiple ways how you could use the Custom Statistics here:

2.1 Numerical

If you just want to get an idea of how well you executed your trades then using a numerical custom Statistic might be the way to go:

You can see that this approach will give you great insights into your trading. However, there is an even better approach.

2.2 Criteria based

Instead of just saying how many criteria are present, you can name the actual criteria and then check them off. This might require a little testing in Edgewonk, especially if you trade multiple patterns with different criteria.

Let this just be an inspiration for your own trading and think how you could use this in your Edgewonk trading journal. But the possibilities and the insights you will get into your performance once you start exploring how well individual signals work are priceless.

You can use the Custom Statistic checklist filter in Edgewonk and in all the different analytic tabs and so really understand your trading, your patterns and the different signals as well.

Do you want to try Edgewonk? Get the free trial here: Edgewonk’s free trial