BullionEdge Pro — Pre-trade checklist

The pre-trade checklist

Eight questions, asked in the same order before every entry. The point is not finding trades — it is making the decision repeatable when you least feel like being repeatable.

A pre-trade checklist is a fixed set of questions you answer before committing, in the same order, every time. Its purpose is not to find trades. It is to make the decision repeatable, so that the trade you take on a bad afternoon is judged by the same standard as the one you take on a good morning.

That is the whole mechanism, and it is unglamorous on purpose. The failure a checklist prevents is not "I did not know the rules." It is "I knew the rules and skipped three of them because this one looked obvious."

The eight questions

1. What is the level, and did I mark it before price arrived?

A level identified after price is already reacting to it is not analysis, it is narration. If it was not on the chart beforehand, treat it as weaker evidence than one that was.

2. Where is the invalidation, in price?

Not "if it looks wrong" — a number. If you cannot name the price at which the idea is finished, the idea does not exist yet. This is also the input everything downstream needs: no stop price, no position size.

3. What is the reward against that risk?

Measured to a level you can point at, not to a round number that makes the ratio work. A 2R target invented to justify a trade is not a target.

4. What win rate does this ratio need just to break even?

For a reward:risk of R, break-even is 1 ÷ (1 + R). At 1R you need better than 50%. At 2R you need 33%. At 3R, 25%. If your honest estimate of this setup's hit rate is below that line, the trade is negative expectancy no matter how good it looks.

5. Is the size correct for the stop?

Risk budget divided by stop distance, rounded down. Never chosen first. The lot size calculator does this arithmetic.

6. Is there a hard reason not to take it?

A veto is different from a negative. Scheduled high-impact news inside your holding period, a stop that sits the wrong side of an obvious level, an instrument you do not have a spec for, a position that rounds to zero. A veto ends the decision — it is not a point deducted from a score, and no amount of quality elsewhere buys it back.

7. Which session am I in?

The same setup does not behave identically at 03:00 and at the London–New York overlap. Thinner books mean wider spreads and more failed breakouts. See the best time to trade gold.

8. What state am I in?

The last trade's outcome, how many you have taken today, and whether you are trying to recover something. This is the question traders drop first and the one that does the most damage when dropped — the trades that ruin a month are usually the ones taken twenty minutes after a loss.

Scoring it, and the limits of a score

Once the questions are fixed you can weight them and produce a number, which makes two useful things possible: comparing this setup against your own history, and noticing that your best trades cluster above some threshold. BullionEdge Pro does exactly that.

Three things are worth being explicit about, because a score presented without them is misleading:

• A veto beats the score. A hard stop returns AVOID whatever the total says. If a high score could override a veto, the veto was decoration.
• Confidence is capped, and the lowest cap wins. Missing data cannot be scored around. Where several caps apply, the most pessimistic is the one that holds.
• The probability estimate is bounded. It stays inside a published 8–82% band, because a rules engine reading levels you typed in has no business claiming 95% certainty about anything.

None of this predicts price. The score measures the quality of a plan against a fixed standard. A well-scored plan still loses, often — that is what a 60% win rate means.

Where journaling comes in

A checklist run and then forgotten teaches you nothing. The value compounds only when the answers are recorded alongside the outcome, because that is the only way to discover that — for instance — every trade you took in the third hour of a session lost, or that your overrides of question six are individually defensible and collectively catastrophic.

BullionEdge Pro answers most of these eight from the chart itself — the level, the invalidation, the reward:risk and the session are measured from closed candles rather than asked — then scores the setup, sizes the position from your own stop, and keeps the journal. Offline, in your browser, on your device. The questions it cannot answer for you are the ones about your own state, and those it still asks.