Lesson 01

The plan is the trade

Decide at 9:00, while nothing is moving.

In one lineEvery decision you make at 9:31 was easier at 9:00. A plan moves them there.

The open you already know

Three good weeks, then one open. The first candle runs, you chase it, it turns, you flip, and by 10:15 you are trading to get back to even. Nothing about that morning was a knowledge problem. You knew what value was. You knew the overnight high. You just met them for the first time at full speed.

The fix is not a better read at 9:31. It is having done the reading at 9:00, when price is quiet, your head is clear and nothing is asking you to click.

The open runs through the overnight high toward yesterday's high and fails. Both levels were on the chart at 9:00. A plan would have said what to do at each one before price got there. Illustration from simulated prices, not a real session.

What a plan is

A plan is a short card you write before the bell. It has four parts, and every lesson in this course builds one of them:

The map. A handful of prices that matter today, ranked. (Lesson 02)
The script. Where the market opens against yesterday decides which story is most likely, and which one you are guarding against. (Lesson 03)
The if-thens. At each level: what price has to do, what you do, where you are wrong and where you are going. (Lesson 04)
The room. Whether the distance to the next level is worth what you risk to get there. (Lesson 05)

Then you run it at the bell and grade it after the close (Lesson 06).

What a plan is not

It is not a prediction. You do not need to know whether today goes up. You need to know what you will do if it goes up into the overnight high, and what you will do if it can't. A good plan has a line for both, so whichever way the open goes, you are reading from a card instead of reacting to a candle.

It is also not a list of every line you can draw. A plan with fifteen levels is a plan to hesitate fifteen times.

Why it works

Speed. At the open, price covers in minutes what it covered in hours overnight. Decisions made in advance don't have to keep up.
Honesty. You wrote down where you are wrong before you had a position to defend. That line is much harder to move later.
Feedback. A written plan can be graded. "I felt bullish" can't. Twenty graded plans will teach you more about your own trading than any course, this one included.

Key terms

Pre-market planThe levels, scripts and if-thens you write before the open.

MapThe few prices that matter today, ranked.

ScriptThe most likely story for the day, given where it opens.

If-thenA level, a trigger, an action, a stop and a target.

Try it

Tomorrow, before 9:15 ET, write three lines on paper: where price is now, the nearest level above and the nearest level below, and what you will do if price reaches each one. Don't trade it yet. Just see whether the open went where your card said it might.

AXIS Desk · The Pre-Market Plan · free. Education only, not trade advice. Futures trading involves substantial risk of loss; past patterns do not guarantee future results.