LOG YOURFree Tool
Pre-Trade Checklist
The last gate between a plan and live risk. Four sections, sixty seconds: context, setup, risk math, and the falsification step most traders skip — arguing against your own trade before the market does it for you.
1. Context — does this trade belong in your plan?
2. The Setup — is the structure actually there?
3. Risk — is the math on your side?
4. Falsification — argue against yourself
The checklist is the edge
Most losing trades were lost before the entry: no defined stop, sized by feel, taken against the higher-timeframe bias, or entered mid-range out of impatience. Each checklist item exists because skipping it has a known failure mode. The falsification section matters most — a trade that can't survive your own honest argument against it should never receive your money.
Run this after your daily routine, and size the position with the position size calculator.
Frequently asked questions
What should a pre-trade checklist include?
Four areas: context (is the trade planned and aligned with your bias?), setup quality (levels mapped, entry at structure, stop beyond invalidation), risk math (minimum 2:1 reward-to-risk, size from fixed risk percentage, within loss limits), and falsification (written reasons against the trade and a defined invalidation point).
What is the falsification step in trading?
Before entering, you deliberately argue against your own trade: list the reasons NOT to take it and define exactly where the idea is proven wrong. This counters confirmation bias — the tendency to only see evidence supporting a trade you already want to take. If the trade survives honest falsification, it earns the entry.
What is a first trouble area (FTA)?
The first significant level or zone between your entry and your target where price is likely to stall or reverse — prior support/resistance, a high-volume node, or a session open. If the FTA is too close to your entry, the trade has poor effective reward-to-risk even if the final target looks far away.
Why use a checklist if I already know my strategy?
Because knowing and doing diverge under pressure. Surgeons and pilots use checklists not because they lack knowledge but because stress erodes execution. A pre-trade checklist takes 60 seconds and catches the impulse trades, revenge trades and oversized positions that account for most of a discretionary trader's losses.
In LogYourTrade, these checks run as launch gates.
The app pulls your bias from today's prep, computes your R:R and risk live, requires written falsification, and blocks execution when hard gates fail. Not a checklist you might skip — a cockpit you fly through.