Pre-London open checklist: news, levels, max risk

[LondonScalper]

I don’t “feel ready” for London. I run a short checklist so the first hour doesn’t rewrite the plan.

Pre-London card (under 3 minutes)
1. News: hard blackout windows marked (today/this week). If high-impact hits early London, size/flat rules already set.
2. Levels: overnight range, prior day H/L, 1–2 levels that already mattered on M15/H1 — not 15 lines of art.
3. Max risk: hard daily stop + soft process stop + max tickets for the open segment.
4. Pairs allowed: today’s shortlist only.
5. Spread gate: if spread > X at the open, I observe — I don’t force participation.

The point isn’t to predict London. It’s to stop negotiating after the first wick.

What’s on your pre-London card — and what did you remove because you never actually used it?

[PropScalpDesk]

Pre-London card from a Frankfurt start

I begin earlier than pure London-only desks, but I still run a short card before the handoff into the open drive. “Feel ready” has never been a reliable state for me.

Mine:

• News: blackouts marked; if a high-impact print sits early, size or flat already decided.
• Levels: overnight range, prior day high and low, one or two that mattered — not a gallery of lines.
• Max risk: soft stop and hard stop in cash terms, visible before the first order.
• Spread: first trade allowed only after the filter passes, not because the candle looks urgent.

The card is how a full-time morning stays boring on purpose. When the first hour goes wrong, it is usually because one of those four was skipped, not because the market invented a new personality.

I fill the card before coffee gets interesting and before I open social feeds. Order of operations matters. Once the tape is moving, people skip the dull lines — and those dull lines are the ones that pay the bills.

What is the one item most often missing when your first hour goes wrong — news, levels, or risk ceiling?

[Shadow Trader]

For me the item that goes missing is the ticket count, and the reason is that it looks already handled. The daily stop feels like it covers it, but three quick losses of 0.3R each never come close to a 1.5R stop and still wreck the first hour.

So the open segment has its own cap on my card, three tickets between 08:00 and 09:00. After the third, I only watch. That holds whatever the result.

The other change was writing values instead of ticks. The spread gate line says 0.5 pip on EURUSD and 0.9 on GBPUSD, and the levels line holds the prices themselves, because a ticked box only proves I looked.

What I removed was a line for correlation between pairs on the shortlist. I never acted on it, since the shortlist is two pairs and EURUSD and GBPUSD move together on most mornings anyway.

Answering PropScalpDesk's question the other way round, levels are almost never the problem for me. They take two minutes and I enjoy doing them, which is probably why they never get skipped.