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My shutdown routine used to be: close the platform, go and cook dinner. That was fine until I realised I couldn't tell you at the end of any week what my trading had cost me in spreads, commission and swaps.

Now the routine runs from about 17:00 to 17:20 London, after the last NY-session trade. It's written on an index card taped to the monitor.

Close all positions. Not "almost all". If something is open, it either closes or gets a written reason in the journal.

Export the day's statement and paste it into my spreadsheet. The sheet automatically pulls out spread paid at entry (from my own log), commission per ticket, and any swap.

Fill in three numbers by hand: gross P&L, total costs, net P&L. Then the ratio of costs to gross profit. On a good day that ratio is around 15 to 20%. On a poor day where I scratched a lot of trades, costs can exceed gross profit entirely, which means I paid the broker to trade without making anything.

Write one line about the day. Not a feeling, a fact. "Five trades after 15:00, four of them scratches, costs £86."

Shut the terminals down fully. Not minimised.

The costs line has changed more about my trading than the P&L line. I trade less in the afternoon now, because I could see in black and white that my scratches after 15:00 were a donation.

The cost to gross ratio is the number I wish I'd tracked ten years earlier. I'd add one split to it: costs on scratches versus costs on trades that ran to target or stop. My scratches are about a third of my tickets but closer to half of my spread paid, because I tend to scratch in the thinner minutes.

One thing I'd question is the 17:00 start. If the last trade is at 16:40, fine, but on days I stop at 11:00 I found doing the routine straight away was better than waiting. By evening I'd already rewritten the morning in my head.

Swap is worth its own column even for scalpers. A couple of times a month I'd carry something past 22:00 by accident, and on a Wednesday that's triple swap on a position I never meant to hold.

The one line fact is a good habit. I'd keep a running tally of those lines too, so after a month you can search for "after 15:00" and count how often it shows up.

Do you include the cost of the VPS and data in the weekly version, or only per trade costs?

Something I'd change in the routine is the time frame of the ratio. A single day's cost to gross number swings too much to act on, because one scratch heavy day can read 150% and the next good day 12%.

I keep a rolling 20 day figure next to the daily one, and only act on the rolling number. It moves slowly enough that I don't rewrite rules after one bad afternoon.

The other split that paid off was by hour. I bucket every ticket's costs and gross by the London hour it was opened, so the after 15:00 finding becomes a number rather than an impression.

Over my last quarter, the 08:00 hour ran at about 14% costs to gross and the 15:00 to 17:00 block at just over 40%. That block also had the most tickets, which is the worst combination.

Seeing it per hour made it easy to cut one hour instead of the whole afternoon. The 16:00 hour went first, and the 15:00 one is on probation.

At what rolling ratio would you drop an hour completely? I've settled on 35% over 20 days, but I picked it more by feel than by anything rigorous.