Module 5 — Your First Process

Everything in Modules 1–4 evaporates in about a month if it stays theoretical — that's not pessimism, it's how habits work. The capstone is a minimal daily process: five minutes before the session, execution rules during, ten minutes after. Small enough that you'll actually do it; complete enough that every idea in this course gets exercised daily.

The routine

Before (5 minutes) — prepare. Write three things: today's plan (which setups you're allowed to trade, at what size), the circuit-breaker card check (Module 4 — loss limit armed?), and one sentence of market context from the five-question chart read (T1 capstone). If you can't write the plan, you don't have one — and now you know before it costs money.

During — execute and tally. No analysis, just two running marks: setups taken that were on the plan, and rule violations. That's the whole in-session psychology practice — awareness without self-flagellation. (The violations tally feeds the two-strike pause automatically.)

After (10 minutes) — review by process. Grade the day on execution, not P&L: the Module 2 checklist, one letter grade, one sentence on the single thing to improve tomorrow. This is the daily report card — the instrument Lance Breitstein credits across his fifteen-year retrospective (verified sources on his profile; the Library page has the full template): success judged on whether you improved the thing you were working on, with P&L deliberately demoted to a footnote.

That's it. No dream journal, no two-hour post-mortems — those burn out in a week. The design principle, borrowed from Steenbarger's performance framing (paraphrase): consistency of review beats intensity of review, the same way it does in the market itself. A B-minus routine done daily outperforms an A-plus routine done twice.

Why the routine carries the psychology

Look at what each piece quietly enforces. The morning plan makes probability concrete — you commit to setups before knowing outcomes, which is Module 1 practiced rather than believed. The violations tally separates process from results in real time — Module 2. The fixed loss limit makes losing a budgeted line item — Module 3. The whole card was written calm, for use under fire — Module 4. A trader who runs this routine for ninety days hasn't learned trading psychology; they've installed it — and they've generated the one dataset (their own journal) that the efficiency capstone said is the only honest way to know whether an edge exists at all.

Reference pages: The trading journal · The daily report card. Where next: Risk, Ruin & the Math of Survival (P2) formalizes the sizing math; the journaling course (P3) deepens the review layer when it ships.

Capstone assignment

Run the full routine for five consecutive sessions — paper trading is fine; the routine doesn't care. On day five, review your five report cards and answer in writing: which module of this course did you violate most often in practice? That answer is your personal curriculum for the next ninety days — and it's worth more than any generic advice, because it came from the only trader whose data you fully trust: you, observed honestly, five days running.

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