A weekly trading plan is a short list of if-then orders written before the market opens: instrument, entry trigger, stop, target and size, decided while no position is open and no price is moving. It takes 20 minutes only when the decisions are systematised — the routine below is the system, and it is the same shape of process behind every setup published on the desk.
Weekly candles have closed, so the highest-timeframe structure is settled — nothing you analyse on Sunday can wriggle while you are analysing it. There is no open P&L staring at you, which is the single biggest corruptor of judgement: a plan written while you are in a trade is a rationalisation, not a plan.
The second reason is practical. Orders written on Sunday work for you all week. A break-above order does not need you at the screen when it triggers; it needs you to have decided the level in advance. Traders with jobs do not lose because they lack screen time — they lose because they make live decisions in stolen minutes. The routine moves every decision to the one hour you actually have.
1) Screen for structure, not stories. Start with a fixed universe — liquid large-caps, the major forex pairs, one or two crypto majors — and keep only charts where the long-term trend is intact (a simple test: the 50-week average above the 200-week). You are filtering out battlegrounds, not finding winners.
2) Mark the level that matters. One level per chart: the breakout price, the pullback zone, or the higher-timeframe value area. If you cannot name the level in one sentence, the chart goes back in the pile.
3) Define the trigger type. A break above, a daily close above, or a pullback tag are three different trades with three different failure modes. Writing which one it is forces you to know how it invalidates.
4) Set the stop before the entry. The stop goes where the idea is wrong, and position size is derived from that distance — never the other way around. Across the 79 closed trades in the published record, 35 lost, and not one lost more than 1.01× the planned risk. That is what pre-decided stops look like in aggregate.
5) Set a target that pays for the losers. At roughly a 2:1 payoff you only need to win about a third of the time to break even. Targets below 1.5R force you to be right more often than most methods allow.
6) Write the if-then lines. "IF NVDA closes above X, THEN long, stop Y, target Z, size = 1R." Five to ten lines is a full week. Anything that happens outside those lines is not your trade.
News-flow, opinions and intraday noise. A weekly plan does not need a market forecast — it needs conditional responses to prices. The plan also skips mid-week improvisation by design: if a setup was not worth writing down on Sunday, it is not worth taking on Wednesday because a chart looks exciting.
One honest limit: a 20-minute Sunday works when someone has already done the scanning, screening and level-marking underneath it. Done alone from scratch it is closer to two hours — the watchlist guide walks through the full manual version, and compressing those two hours is precisely what a research desk sells.
Every Sunday before the open: analysed swing setups across stocks, forex and crypto with the exact entry, stop and target — plus the live dashboard, two letters a week, the TradingView indicator suite and the masterclass library.
Get this week’s setups →With a fixed universe and a repeatable checklist, 20–40 minutes. From scratch — scanning, screening, marking levels yourself — budget two hours or more. The time is front-loaded in building the system, not in running it.
Five to ten conditional orders is plenty, and most weeks fewer will trigger. For reference, the desk’s published record closed 79 trades in roughly nine months — about two per week actually completing, from a much larger watchlist.
Levels do not move because you are bored. The only legitimate mid-week edits are removing a setup whose precondition broke (a gap through the level, unexpected earnings) — never adding trades that were not worth writing down on Sunday.
That is what conditional orders are for. A stop-entry or limit order with an attached stop-loss executes the plan without you. If your broker cannot attach the stop automatically, size down until the gap between trigger and your next check-in is survivable.