My routine has seven steps. Only two of them are hard.

I trade gold, mostly. Some positions last minutes, some last a day or two. I used to think the difference between those two mattered a great deal, and that what I needed was the right method for each.

For years I changed methods constantly. I would find something, use it, lose with it, decide it was the problem, and go looking for the next one. What eventually stopped that search was not finding the right one. It was understanding that there isn't one — that the method is not where the outcome is decided, and that trading cannot be planned like a production schedule with fixed numbers attached.

What I have instead is a routine. Seven steps, in order, every morning. I am writing it out because I had nothing like it when I started, and because the interesting part is not the routine itself — it is which parts of it are difficult.

One. News first. Geopolitics, the state of any ongoing war, statements from major political figures, central bank and economic news from the large economies. I read enough to form a rough orientation for the day. For gold this matters more than it would for some other instruments.

This step used to take a long time. Now I keep one saved prompt containing everything I want covered, hand it to an AI in the morning, and read the summary. That part got much easier. What did not get easier is being able to judge the summary — knowing whether the picture it gives me is reasonable. That only comes from having done it many times yourself.

Two. The economic calendar. What is scheduled today that can move the market, and at what time.

Three. The chart, between H1 and D1, to see the trend.

After those three I can answer one question: which direction has the better odds today.

Four. The plan. Marking where I would be willing to enter — connecting HH/HL or LH/LL for trend lines, marking support and resistance zones, order blocks, liquidity, Fibonacci levels — and drawing horizontal lines at the levels that come out of that.

Five. Size, the loss I am willing to accept, and what I expect if it works. Decided now, before anything is open.

Those five steps are work, but they are not hard. I can do them calmly with coffee. Nothing is at stake yet.

Six. Wait for price to reach the level.

This is the hardest thing in my trading, and it is where I have broken my own rules more than anywhere else.

Sitting in front of the chart, an opportunity appears that is not the one I planned. It looks good. It looks like it is happening right now and will be gone in a minute. Suppressing that is genuinely difficult, and for a long time I did not suppress it — I would take the trade.

Those trades mostly failed, and not by accident. An unplanned position starts to feel wrong the moment price moves slightly against it, because there was never a reason behind it to hold on to. Discomfort turns into fear, fear makes the decisions, and a few of those have turned into a sequence of angry trades that lost several times in a row.

So the problem was never that watching the chart for hours is boring. It is that watching the chart is what produces the mistake.

An alert is the obvious answer, and for most of those years I did not have one I could use. The platform I traded on could not notify me once I stepped away from the terminal. The other options I eventually found were either expensive or so awkward to configure that I gave up on them. For a long time my only genuinely reliable alert was my phone: "8:30 tonight, nonfarm." That was it.

These days I get through step six most of the time.

Seven. Stop loss and take profit do their work.

Here too I try not to look at the chart, and here too looking is what causes the damage. My particular weakness is closing early — price starts to hesitate, I decide it is about to turn, and I take a smaller result than the one I planned rather than sit through the discomfort.

When I follow all seven in order, without rearranging them to suit how I feel that morning, my trading is consistent in a way it never was before. I am not going to put a number on that, because a number from one person's account proves nothing about anyone else's.

Why I stopped trying to scalp around a job

I spent six years working in South Korea, some days fourteen hours. I tried to trade alongside it and found it was not possible, and it is worth being precise about why.

It was not the hours in themselves. It was that shorter-term trading requires you to be present at a moment you cannot schedule. Opening your phone every few minutes to check whether price has reached your level is not something you can do while working, and it is not something you can do afterwards either — arriving home exhausted and then watching a chart for hours is a fantasy I abandoned fairly quickly.

So I barely traded in those years. Given the same circumstances and no way to be notified, I would make the same choice again.

This article is for information only. It is not trading advice.