Pre-Market Brief Without Predictions

Second Officer · SO04: Daily Routine and Journal · About 25 minutes

Safety rule: A scheduled event is a reason to plan, never proof that price will rise or fall.

Your mission today

By the end you can prepare a one-page trading brief that separates known facts from guesses.

Before you start

A demo chart, official market calendar, the broker's symbol-hours screen and yesterday's journal. All numbers and chart sequences below are imaginary teaching examples.

1. Understand the problem

Why pilots brief before a flight

Pilots prepare for weather, runway restrictions and alternate routes. They do not pretend to know every gust of wind. A trading brief is similar: it records what can be checked before a session and what action becomes unsafe if conditions change.

Your brief should identify the exact market, account currency, broker time zone and review times. Add the session opening and closing hours, known event calendar entries, current spread and relevant chart state. Known information can be sourced. Assumptions must be labelled. A statement such as 'the market must rally after inflation' is a prediction, not a fact.

2. Worked example: show the loss first

Use an imaginary demo account with a $1,000 balance and a written maximum planned price loss of $5 per order. A proposed EURUSD order has a 10-pip stop and costs about $1 per pip at the selected size. That makes 10 × $1 = $10 of planned loss, twice the permitted amount. The brief should mark SKIP before discussing any possible profit.

Now suppose there is an important scheduled announcement at 13:30 UTC and the spread is unusually wide. The correct brief records WAIT or SKIP under the prewritten event and spread rules, not a guess about which direction the news will move price. A favourable 20-pip scenario could yield $20 gross at that size, but it is irrelevant because the order already fails its risk gate.

Original Black Box Journey illustration. Imaginary exercise, not historical market evidence.

3. Apply the idea

Use one consistent briefing form

Write six short entries: Market and exact symbol; When and local/server clocks; Known events with source and timestamp; Chart observations from completed candles only; Risk limits for the day and existing exposure; Personal readiness, including fatigue or interruptions.

A chart observation might be 'the last H1 candle closed inside yesterday's range'. That describes a visible fact. 'A breakout is guaranteed today' does not. If you do not know the symbol's contract specification or the current trading hours, put UNKNOWN and do not proceed with an order.

4. Test the limitations

State what changes your plan

A useful brief specifies the condition that would require an update. A spread wider than your maximum, a market halt, an unexpected outage or a major event can change a planned entry into a rejection.

Avoid pretending to know what the next candle will show. At a fixed check time, review only the evidence available then. The decision can be TRADE, WAIT or SKIP if your plan allows it. A complete brief also states when the session is over, so you do not start impulsive entries out of boredom.

5. Record a defensible decision

Finish the briefing with a short debrief plan

Before opening any ticket, write what you intend to record afterward. Save your original brief with its timestamp. After the session, compare it with actual decisions without rewriting what you knew at the beginning.

A brief can be successful on a day when no trades occur. Correctly staying flat is a trained decision. Your goal is not to guess a price direction; it is to create conditions in which your behaviour can be examined and improved.

6. Finish a pre-market brief with a no-trade permission

Synthetic EURUSD briefing: The last completed H1 range runs from 1.08300 to 1.08600. An imaginary platform currently quotes Bid 1.08500 and Ask 1.08512, a 1.2-pip spread. Your paper rule permits at most one pip. Even if the chart looks attractive, the written decision is SKIP while that restriction applies. Do not invent a directional forecast to justify an order.

Suppose a hypothetical 10-pip stop at $1 per pip would risk −$10 before additional charges. If your cash limit is $8, that proposed size also fails. Record both independent reasons, since a smaller spread alone would not fix an oversized position.

Practice record: Write the instrument, time zone, completed higher-timeframe range, session, observed spread, known scheduled-event window, maximum planned cash risk and next decision checkpoint. Finish with TRADE, WAIT or SKIP and one sentence explaining which information would change the decision. A correct brief can end with zero trades.

Common mistake

Writing 'EURUSD bullish today' as the entire plan skips times, costs and risk. It also turns a viewpoint into an obligation to trade. Replace the slogan with observable chart conditions and a clear no-entry list.

Plain-English glossary

• Brief: A short plan written before the session.
• Known event: An announcement scheduled or reported by a reliable source.
• Time zone: The clock convention used to timestamp observations.
• Completed candle: A price bar whose period has ended.
• Exclusion: A prewritten reason to skip entering.
• Readiness: Your ability to follow the plan without preventable distraction.

Try it yourself

Prepare three different one-page demo briefs. Show the official calendar source, UTC and broker times, session hours, observed spread, current exposure and explicit no-entry conditions. Record one day when WAIT or SKIP is the correct result and explain the exact failed gate. Keep the original prompt and your answer in the student journal.

What you can now do

• Document known facts before the market decision.
• Apply a daily risk and event exclusion checklist.
• Preserve the original brief for an honest review.

Next lesson

SO04.2 · Trade, Wait or Skip. First finish and check the worksheet above.