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After every surprise headline that catches me in a trade, I fill in the same short template, usually that evening. It takes ten minutes and has done more for my handling of these events than any amount of reading.

Here it is as I use it, with the answers from a GBPUSD trade in the spring as an example.

Time of headline (London) and time I noticed it: 10:42 and 10:43. One minute gap, which is fine.

Position at the time: long 1.2 lots GBPUSD, stop 6 pips below, about 4 pips in profit.

Initial move in the first 60 seconds: 22 pips down.

Where my stop filled versus where it was set: 3.1 pips worse than the stop price.

What I did in the first minute: nothing, which was the right call since the stop was on the server.

What I did in the next ten minutes: tried a long at 10:49 because I thought it was overdone. Lost another 5 pips. That was the wrong call.

Was my position size appropriate for the risk of a gap? Yes, the total loss was within my normal limits even with slippage.

Was I trading correlated pairs that made the damage worse? No.

What would I do differently? No re-entry for 30 minutes, which is now a written rule.

That last line is the only one that matters, really. Everything else is there to make me honest about it.

The one minute gap between the headline and noticing it is a field I'd split in two. It matters where the headline reached you, because a squawk, a wire alert and a chart move give very different delays, and the source is the part you can actually change.

I'd also add the spread at the moment of the stop fill. On my own headline stops, the slippage was mostly spread blowing out rather than price gapping, and knowing which one it was changes the fix.

Your 10:49 re-entry is the most familiar line in the template for me. The 30 minute rule is sensible, but I tie mine to a condition as well: spread back to normal and two M5 closes in the same direction, whichever comes later.

Correlated pairs is a good question to keep even when the answer is no. A GBP headline that also hits EURGBP can double the damage on a day you weren't thinking of it as one trade.

Do you also fill it in for headlines that land while you're flat? I started doing that, and it showed me the trades I would have taken, which was humbling.

LondonScalper, the first minute do nothing line in your template is the one I print at the top now. On server stops the best action is no action, and writing that before the spike stops me from yanking a working stop into a market order.

I added a field for inventory state in R at the headline, not only lot size. Being plus 0.4R versus minus 0.2R changes whether I even consider a flatten click, and the spring example would have read differently with that number on the page.

Evening fill discipline matters as much as the fields. If the template is not done by 21:00 London the same day, I mark it LATE, and three LATE rows in a month means I review the whole headline ruleset on Sunday.

Correlated pairs stay even when the answer is none. The blank answer is useful because it forces the check.

Do you score the 10:49 style re entry as a separate incident, or fold it into the same row? I split it, because the headline loss and the revenge loss need different fixes.