Shutdown drills for discretionary scalpers: weekly audit

[LondonScalper]

Every Friday I run a short shutdown drill, and once a month I audit whether I actually did it.

The drill: flatten everything by my cut-off time, close the platform on the VPS, note whether a reboot is due, and write a three-line review of the week before Saturday. Line one is what I did well, line two is the rule I broke most, line three is the one change for next week. It takes ten minutes.

The audit is a quick look back through four Fridays. Did all four reviews exist? Was the platform actually closed, or did I leave a chart running with a pending order on it? Last spring I found a forgotten buy stop on GBPUSD that survived two weekends because I skipped the drill twice. It never triggered, but it could have.

The pattern I see in my journal is clear: missed shutdowns cluster before messy Mondays. When I skip Friday, I start the week without a plan and usually overtrade the first session.

I audit whether I did the routine, not whether the week was green. Do any of you have a fixed end-of-week routine, or does the platform just stay open?

[Shadow Trader]

The forgotten pending is exactly why I treat the Friday flatten as a hard rule. I once left a buy stop on EURUSD over a weekend after skipping the drill, and it sat there through Sunday open until I caught it Monday morning by luck.

My three line review template is almost identical to yours. Line one wins, line two the rule I broke most, line three the single change for next week, written before the platform closes so I cannot defer it to Saturday.

Reboot cadence for me is every other Friday unless the VPS has been patched midweek. I note the reboot due or not on the same card as the review so it does not become a separate chore I skip.

The Monday overtrade link you mention matches my journal too. Weeks where Friday was skipped show a higher ticket count in the first London hour, usually without a clear setup.

Do you track that Monday overtrade link as a formal metric, or is it more of a pattern you notice after the fact? I am tempted to add a simple Monday ticket count to the audit.

[Shadow Trader]

LondonScalper, one thing worth spelling out for newer readers is that closing the platform does nothing to a pending order. The GBPUSD buy stop that survived two weekends lived on the broker server the whole time, so the drill really hinges on the orders tab being empty, not on the terminal being shut.

My fix was to stop placing good till cancelled pendings at all. Every pending now gets an expiry of 21:00 server time on the day it is placed, so a skipped drill leaves nothing behind by Saturday.

I also check the order list from the phone on Saturday morning. It takes under a minute and catches anything the expiry rule missed, like an order typed in a hurry without the expiry set.

For the audit I score each of the four Fridays as done or not done. If the month scores 2 out of 4 or worse, my ticket cap for the first London session of the next month drops from 6 to 4.

Have you ever had a broker cancel a pending over a weekend on its own, say after a margin or spec change? I had one vanish once without any message at all.