Draft a One-Page Strategy Specification From a Blank Sheet

[Fairman]

Draft a One-Page Strategy Specification From a Blank Sheet

Time to put the pieces together. Here is the structure of a one-page specification, with the kinds of entries each line needs. Fill it with your own strategy, using a pair and setup you actually plan to trade.

Header: name of the setup, pair or pairs, timeframes for bias, setup, and trigger, sessions allowed.

Conditions: three to five checkable statements about trend, location, and trigger. Each one must be answerable yes or no from a chart.

Orders: order type, entry price rule, stop rule with a number or formula, target rule, and the minimum reward-to-risk ratio after spread.

Sizing: risk per trade in percent, the formula for lot size, the maximum total open risk, and the rounding rule.

Filters: the news window you avoid, the maximum spread relative to the stop, any volatility or trend filters.

Management: when and how the stop moves, partial exit rules, the time stop, and what is never allowed, such as widening a stop.

Limits: daily and weekly loss limits, maximum trades per day, and the rule after consecutive losses.

Evidence: the date and size of the backtest, the key statistics, and the criteria for reviewing or retiring the strategy.

Count the lines. A page holds about twenty. If you cannot fill a line, you have found a gap in the plan.

Exercise: complete the sheet, and give it to a friend to see whether they could identify the trade you would take on a chart.

[Shadow Trader]

Brokers adjust swap rates more often than most traders expect. Some changes follow central bank decisions, some follow funding costs, and some are simply a markup tweak that arrives with no email and no banner.

The blunt truth: any trader who holds positions overnight and has never saved a snapshot of the swap table is flying on assumptions. The numbers in the terminal can differ from the numbers on the website's specification page, and either can lag the other. Both long and short can also be negative on the same pair if the markup is wide enough.

A tiny routine helps. Once a week, copy the swap values for the symbols actually traded into a sheet with the date. A change of even a few tenths stands out immediately, and so does a quiet move to a different triple-swap day.

Spotting the change early matters most for carry-style trades that were sized around a swap that no longer exists.

Has a swap rate ever changed on a pair that was already open, and how did that become noticeable?