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After a deep drawdown, a full week off, no charts, no forum, is a common reset. It's worth being clear about what it can and can't do.

What a break tends to help with:

• Cleaner trading on return: fewer impulsive entries, more patience at the open.
• Seeing the drawdown with fresh eyes. Rule breaks that were easy to rationalise during the drawdown are often obvious afterwards.
• Stopping the drawdown from getting deeper, which is not nothing.

What it doesn't do: fix results directly. If the strategy is fine and the losses came from behaviour, results recover once the behaviour does, which can take a week or two.

A useful review during the break: go through the drawdown trades and mark each as a valid trade or a rule break. If a large share of the losses came from a few rule breaks, that's the real finding.

The risk is that breaks become a habit after every bad week. A pre-set trigger helps, for example: a full week off only if the drawdown exceeds 8R, or the same rule is broken three times in a week.

Has anyone taken planned breaks? Did you come back better, or just rested?

A retail platform like MetaTrader connects through the broker's proprietary protocol. FIX, a standard messaging protocol used by institutions, is available at some brokers for advanced clients.

What changes is the path. FIX connections usually skip some of the overhead of retail platforms, supply a direct stream of quotes, and allow faster order handling. Order types are richer, and control over execution parameters improves. For a strategy that relies on speed or on many small orders, it can be a real step up.

The price is complexity. Building or buying a client that speaks FIX, handling sessions and sequence numbers, managing reconnections, and testing thoroughly all take effort. Brokers often require a minimum balance or volume.

Not every broker that offers FIX gives the same quality of service. Some offer it only to a handful of clients, and the pricing feed may differ from the one on retail accounts.

For many traders, the difference isn't worth the work. For someone whose edge is measured in tenths of a pip and milliseconds, it can be.

Is FIX worth the extra effort for a scalper, or does a retail platform get close enough?