ORB Trading Checklist
A close look at the pre session checklist as a working tool. What genuinely belongs on it before an opening range session, why writing it down outperforms recall when the clock is short, and how to stop it growing.
A Checklist Is a Tool, Not a Ritual
The point of running through a list before the open is not diligence for its own sake. It is that certain failures happen quietly and repeatedly, and every one of them is catchable by asking a short question at a moment when there is still time to answer it. A checklist earns its place by catching those, not by making the morning feel professional. If a line on the list has never once changed what you did, it is decoration and it is making the real lines harder to reach.
Written Down Beats Remembered
Everyone believes they will remember to check the calendar. Most mornings they do. The mornings they do not are the mornings something else went wrong first, which is precisely when the check mattered most. Memory degrades under exactly the conditions a pre session routine is meant to survive: time pressure, a late start, an unfamiliar instrument, a bad night. A piece of paper does not degrade. That difference is the whole argument, and it is the same argument used in every other field that runs checklists.
Length Is the Thing That Kills It
A list of thirty items gets abandoned in week three, and it does not get abandoned honestly. It gets skimmed, then partially completed, then remembered as completed. A short list that actually gets finished every session beats a thorough one that gets finished twice. The discipline is not in adding items, which is easy and feels productive, but in removing the ones that never fire and defending the remainder against the constant temptation to expand.
Where the Clock Fits
Anything on the list has to be answerable in the time available before the bell, which is usually less than it seems once the platform, the data and the news have all been dealt with. A check requiring research is not a pre session check, it is preparation and it belongs the previous evening. Sorting items by when they can realistically be done is what makes the difference between a routine that finishes and one that is still half complete when the range starts forming.
Working Through the List
The articles here treat the pre session checklist as an object in its own right: what belongs on it for an opening range approach, why the written version outperforms the remembered one under pressure, and how to keep it short enough that it survives contact with a rushed morning. Entry rules, stop placement and range interpretation are all elsewhere. This is about the ten minutes before any of that becomes relevant.
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Keeping a Checklist Short Enough to Actually Finish
2026-09-03
Every pre session routine starts short and gets longer. Nobody plans this. Each addition is individually justified, usually by something that went wrong recently, and no single line looks like the one that broke the list. Then a morning arrives where the bell is four minutes away, six items remain, and the routine gets skipped entirely rather than partially. That is the failure worth designing against, because it takes the useful items down with the useless ones.
Growth Is the Default Direction
Adding a line feels like learning. Something was missed, the fix is obvious, and writing it down converts an unpleasant experience into a small improvement. Removing a line feels like the opposite. It feels careless, and it invites the thought that the very next session will be the one where the removed item mattered.
The asymmetry is the whole problem. A process where additions are easy and removals are uncomfortable has exactly one long term outcome regardless of how sensible each individual decision was. Unless removal is scheduled deliberately, it does not happen.
What Earns a Place
A useful item has three properties. It has a yes or no answer, so completing it does not require thinking. It can be answered in well under a minute. And its answer has, at least sometimes, changed what happened next.
That third property is the one that quietly disqualifies most lines. An item that has returned the same answer every session for six months is not protecting you, it is costing you time and attention on the mornings when time and attention are scarce. It may still belong somewhere, but somewhere is a weekly review, not the ten minutes before an open.
Some Checks Belong Earlier
A good deal of what accumulates on a pre session list is not a check at all. Reviewing recent sessions, calculating typical range height, updating a spreadsheet, reading through anything: these are preparation, they take real time, and they are being done at the open only because that is when the trader happens to be at the desk.
Moving them to the previous evening usually halves the morning routine at no cost. The test is whether the item could have been completed twelve hours earlier with the same result. If it could, it does not belong in the window where minutes are expensive.
Cutting Without Losing the Reason
Deletion is easier when the item is not actually destroyed. Keeping a separate list of retired checks, with a note of why each was added and why it was pulled, removes most of the discomfort. Nothing is lost, the reasoning survives, and if the same failure recurs the item can come back with its history attached.
This also stops the same line being reinvented every few months. A routine that has cycled the same forgotten item in and out three times is telling you something about the item, and the retired list is where that pattern becomes visible.
Judging the Length
There is no correct number, but there is a reliable test. Run the list under the worst realistic conditions rather than the normal ones: a late arrival, a distracted morning, an unfamiliar instrument. If it finishes under those conditions it will finish under any of them. If it only finishes when the morning goes well, it is too long, and it will fail on precisely the days it was written for.
The other honest signal is whether you are still completing it. A routine that is being skimmed rather than worked through has already failed, and skimming is difficult to notice from the inside because the list still gets marked as done. Watching for that is worth more than any amount of care taken over the wording of individual lines.
What to Verify in the Ten Minutes Before the Bell
2026-09-03
Ten minutes is not much and it is usually all there is. The evening preparation is done or it is not, and the window immediately before the open is for verification rather than thinking. The useful question for any candidate item is simple: has the absence of this check ever cost me something, and can I answer it in under a minute. Most things fail one test or the other.
Is the Platform Actually Working
The dullest check on the list and the one with the worst failure mode. Data feed connected, chart updating, account showing the right balance, order entry responsive rather than merely visible. A frozen feed does not announce itself, it just shows a chart that looks calm, and a calm chart in the first minutes of a session is indistinguishable from a broken one until you try to act on it.
Worth including here is whatever you would need if the platform failed mid session. Knowing the phone number, or that a second device is logged in, takes seconds to confirm and is unavailable to check at the moment you need it.
What Is Scheduled and Where It Traded Overnight
Scheduled releases landing at or shortly after the open change the character of the range, and they do so in a way that is knowable in advance and easy to forget. The check is not only whether something is scheduled but when relative to your range window. A release inside the range period and a release twenty minutes after it produce different problems, and the decision about how to handle each should already exist rather than being invented on the spot.
The related item is anything instrument specific: an earnings report, a scheduled announcement, an expiry. These do not appear on a general economic calendar and are the ones most often missed.
A quick look at the overnight session tells you whether the open is arriving into a market that has already moved. An instrument opening well away from the previous close is starting from a different reference point, and the range that forms afterwards is more likely to be a pause than a discovery. You do not need to decide what to do with that information in the pre session window. You need to have noticed it.
The same glance answers whether recent sessions have been unusually active or unusually flat, which is the context that makes the range height meaningful once it exists.
Are the Numbers Already Set
Position size, maximum loss for the session, and the exact time the range window closes should all be settled before the bell rather than computed while price is moving. Writing them somewhere visible is better than holding them in mind. A number you can see is harder to quietly revise than a number you merely intended.
This is also the place to confirm that the account can actually take the intended position, that no leftover order is sitting in the book from a previous session, and that no position is open that you had forgotten about. Stale orders are rare and expensive.
Are You Fit to Trade This Morning
The least popular item and one of the more useful. Badly slept, running late, still annoyed about yesterday, or arriving at the desk four minutes before the open with none of the above done. Any of these is a legitimate reason to sit the session out, and the only moment you can make that call cleanly is before you have looked at a chart and formed an opinion.
It works best as a written question with a yes or no answer rather than a vague intention to be self aware. Vague intentions lose to the urge to participate every time, and by the time the range is forming the question no longer feels askable.
Ordering Matters
Put the items that could cancel the session first. There is no sense confirming your position size before discovering that the data feed is stale or that a major release lands in six minutes. Anything that produces a stop decision belongs at the top, anything that only refines a trade you are going to take anyway belongs at the bottom, and if the clock runs out the bottom is what you can safely lose.
Why a Checklist Beats Memory Under Time Pressure
2026-09-03
Objecting that you already know what to check is reasonable. Anyone who has traded the same instrument for a year does know, and can recite the items on request. The argument for writing them down has never been that traders are forgetful in general. It is that recall behaves differently when the clock is short and something has already gone slightly wrong, and those are the exact conditions the routine exists to survive.
Recall Fails Selectively
What goes missing under pressure is not random. It tends to be the item that was fine on the previous fifty occasions, because familiarity is what allows a step to be skipped without the skip registering. The calendar has been empty every morning this month, so the glance at the calendar quietly stops happening, and nothing announces its absence until the morning it was not empty.
A written list breaks that mechanism by making completion visible. The question is no longer whether you remembered but whether the line is ticked, and an unticked line is an obvious thing in a way that an unformed thought is not.
Time Pressure Narrows Attention
Arriving late compresses everything. The instinct is to prioritise, and the prioritising happens fast and badly, favouring whatever is most salient rather than whatever is most consequential. Salient usually means the chart, which is the one thing that will still be there in five minutes and the one thing that cannot be checked wrong.
An externalised list resists this because the ordering was decided calmly. You are not choosing under pressure which checks to drop, you are working down a sequence that already knows which checks matter most, and if the clock beats you the items you lose are the ones you had already decided were losable.
The Record It Leaves
A second benefit is quieter and shows up later. A completed list is evidence about the session that does not depend on memory of the session. When a trade goes wrong and you are trying to work out whether the setup was bad or the execution was, knowing that the calendar was checked and the size was set beforehand removes a whole category of guessing.
Over months this accumulates into something more useful than any individual morning. If the same line is repeatedly the one skipped, that is a fact about your routine that only a written record could have produced, and it points at either a badly worded item or a genuinely weak spot.
Where the Argument Runs Out
A checklist is worth defending, not oversold. It cannot make a poor strategy work, and running one faithfully has a way of feeling like progress even when the underlying approach is the actual problem. There is a real failure mode in which the routine becomes the thing being executed well while the trading it precedes stays mediocre.
It also does nothing about judgement. Every item on a good list has a yes or no answer, and the moment an item requires an opinion it stops being a check and becomes a decision wearing the costume of one. Deciding whether today's range is too wide is not a checklist item, however much you might wish it were.
Making It Survive Contact
The version that works is usually physical or at least separate from the trading screen, because a list living in the same window as the chart competes with the chart and loses. Paper, a card, a second monitor, anything that has to be dealt with rather than glanced at.
It also needs to be reviewed on a schedule rather than continuously. Items get added in the aftermath of a bad session, which is the worst moment to be designing a permanent routine, and a list only ever revised in that state grows in one direction. Reading the whole thing once a month with no recent loss in mind is when the useless lines become obvious and can be cut without it feeling like giving something up.
