Your First Week of Live Futures Trading: A Day-by-Day Checklist

Why the first live week needs its own plan

The market doesn't change when you go live. You do. Real money makes some traders move stops, add size after a win or make exceptions they never made in simulation. The first live week is where those gaps show up, so it deserves its own rules. The goal is not profit. It is to finish the week with your account, your rules and an honest record of what you actually did.

Before day one: pre-launch checks

Platform and account. Confirm which account your platform is sending orders to. Confusing live and SIM accounts is a known mistake, and the account name on screen is the check. Confirm your stop and target templates have the distances you intend. Check which loss-limit controls your broker or platform actually enforces. If none do, you are the control, so write the number down and plan to flatten when it hits.

Margin and size. Look up the intraday and overnight margin for your contract at your broker. Margin is collateral, not a cap on loss, so size from your stop. ES is $50 per point and $12.50 per tick. MES is $5 per point and $1.25 per tick. NQ is $20 per point and $5 per tick. MNQ is $2 per point and $0.50 per tick.

Data and contract. Make sure charts show the active contract month and that today's bars load. Don't assume roll dates or session times are the same for every product. Check the CME schedule for the contract you trade, and label times with a time zone. The regular US equity cash open is 9:30 a.m. ET, and holidays are exceptions.

Written plan. Write it the night before. It lists your instrument, trading window, setups, maximum risk per trade, daily loss limit and the number of losses that ends your day. If you use KPL levels, remember they are fixed reference prices anchored to the regular-session opening print, so they cannot be completed before the 9:30 ET open. The plan should say how you will treat them once they are set. See KPL trading for how the levels are built.

Day one: half size, full process

Trade about half the size you used in simulation. If you traded four contracts, trade two. This is a personal process rule, not a law. Half size creates real emotion while limiting the damage if that emotion pushes you into a mistake.

Day one has four jobs. Take only trades that are in the plan. Set the stop the moment you enter. Don't move it. Journal each trade as it happens, with entry, stop, reason and your state of mind. Stop for the day after two losses, whatever the time and however good the next setup looks.

The day-one score is adherence to the plan. Losing $200 while following every rule beats making $400 by breaking them.

Day two: review before trading

Read yesterday's journal before the open. For each trade, ask whether it was in the plan, whether the entry met your written criteria or was talked into, and whether the stop moved. If something broke, find the trigger. It could be a trade right after a loss, a trade after a win or a particular time of day.

Sizing rule: if day one was clean, you may move toward your normal size. If it wasn't, stay at half until you have three clean days in a row. Spend extra time on the morning routine, because a pre-committed level plan reduces how much you improvise.

Day three: trading the market or your P&L

By now you have likely had a meaningful win or a meaningful loss, and both bend judgment. After wins, the pull is to loosen criteria. After losses, it is to shrink stops or force marginal setups to get back to even. Before each trade, ask: would I take this if I were flat on the week? If the honest answer involves your current P&L, skip it.

Day four: add one thing

If you've held the plan for three days, add exactly one element from your playbook. That could be a second setup you practiced, a scale-out method or an extra trading window. Add one thing, run it for a day, and journal it. If it goes badly, remove it. Adding several things at once after a good run is the usual mistake, because you can't tell which one caused the damage.

Day five: weekly review

Trade the plan, then set aside an hour after the close for a structured review.

1. Record net P&L, including commissions.
2. Compute plan adherence: trades in the plan divided by total trades. I like to aim for 90 percent or better, but that is a personal target, not a standard.
3. Count moved stops. Each one is a discipline failure to name specifically.
4. Scan the journal for when decisions got worse: time of day, P&L state, market condition.
5. Check whether size drifted from the plan.
6. Pick one behavior to fix in week two. Don't add a new strategy or new size.

Reading the week's result

A profitable week with rule violations teaches the wrong lesson, because you got paid for breaking your process. A flat week with clean execution is a fine outcome. A losing week with good adherence is usually a sizing or setup problem you can study. A losing week with violations means going back to SIM before adding live exposure. Keep in mind that SIM never reproduces live fills or live psychology, and one week is a tiny sample. It tells you about your habits, not about whether a strategy has an edge.