Pre-trade checklist: 5 questions before you hit the button
A thirty-point checklist sounds rigorous in theory and nobody uses it in practice. A five-question one, that actually fits in the five seconds before entering, does get used.
Many traders have, saved somewhere, an extensive pre-trade checklist — fifteen, twenty, thirty points covering everything from macro context to correlation between instruments. The intention is good. The result, almost always, is that the checklist gets reviewed the first week, with enthusiasm, and then gets abandoned entirely, because no trader is going to stop to run through thirty items at the exact moment price is touching their entry zone.
A checklist that doesn't get used in the moment of pressure is worth nothing, no matter how thorough it is on paper. The solution isn't to make it more exhaustive — it's to reduce it to the bare minimum, verifiable in seconds, so it survives the moment it's needed most.
The five questions that fit in five seconds
Not "looks like" — literally meets the specific technical conditions you defined beforehand. If you have to stretch the interpretation to make it fit, the answer is no.
Not "I'll see how it moves and decide" — a concrete price level, defined before the click, that doesn't depend on how you feel after you're already in the trade.
Calculated, not eyeballed. If answering requires doing a quick calculation you never usually do, the size probably isn't calculated — it's guessed.
If you've already hit your max number of trades or your max daily loss, the correct answer to any setup, however good it looks, is not to enter. No "just this once" exceptions.
This question filters the difference between a trade with real edge and one that only feels good because "this time seems different." If the honest answer is you wouldn't take it knowing the outcome, that's a sign the conviction comes from impulse, not analysis.
Five closed questions, answerable yes or no, can be run through mentally in under ten seconds — enough time to not miss the opportunity if the setup is valid, and just enough time to stop the entry if any answer is no. That's exactly the balance a thirty-point checklist never achieves: any friction beyond a few seconds makes a trader, under real-time pressure, decide to skip it "just this once."
Why writing it down isn't enough — it has to be verified
Having these five questions written down somewhere helps, but it still depends on the same willpower that already failed before under pressure. The real difference shows up when someone else — an accountability partner, or a system that logs whether you actually answered yes to all five before entering — can verify afterward whether the checklist was really used or skipped exactly when it mattered most.
A checklist nobody verifies is a list of good intentions. A checklist that gets logged and reviewed later is proof that the process, not just the result, was correct.
That's exactly the logic behind Guardian's pre-trade plan tracking: it doesn't replace your judgment for deciding whether a setup is valid, but it does keep a record of whether, before entering, you actually went through the questions you decided you had to go through — and it notifies your Accountability Partner when that pattern of skipping the checklist starts repeating.