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Course · Trading

Trade Setup and Execution

Define trade setups, plan entries and exits, size positions, manage trades, and use records to review decisions.

PLANSETUPSEXECUTIONRISKREVIEW
Subject
Trading
Lessons
15
Format
Interactive

Overview

Define trade setups, plan entries and exits, size positions, manage trades, and use records to review decisions.

What it teaches

To write a conditional plan whose every line can be checked after the trade, place the zones it refers to from repeated reactions, and say which of the evidence for it is independent; to recognise a breakout, a pullback and a reversal — and the failed version of each — candle by candle; to pick the entry candle a stated model permits, put the stop beyond invalidation with room for noise, and set targets at structure rather than at a ratio; to compute risk, reward, break-even and expectancy, turn a risk budget into a rounded-down quantity, and manage an open trade to its plan while scoring discipline apart from outcome; to read a backtest for the number that would make you reject the rules, keep a journal another reviewer could use, and write one measurable improvement rule from it.

Who it is for

Anyone who can already read a chart and now wants a repeatable procedure for acting on one. Market Structure is the assumed background: this course places stops at structural levels and enters on pullbacks without stopping to define either. It also suits someone who trades already and cannot say, from records rather than memory, which of their setups actually pays.

Concept dependencies

Entry confirmation requires a named setup: breakout, pullback or reversal. Position sizing needs the stop distance established by stop-loss placement, and performance review needs records from the trading journal. Recording decisions and reviewing their outcomes makes the setup and execution work usable beyond an individual trade.

Lessons

Explanations, examples, interactive tools, and practice questions.

15 lessons

Educational use only — nothing here is trading advice. All charts, trades, prices, fills, and performance results in this course are synthetic educational examples. The pages contain no live market data and no trading signals, and nothing on them is a recommendation or a forecast. Real outcomes can differ because of spread, slippage, commissions, gaps, taxes, liquidity, assignment, exercise, implied volatility, time decay, and other factors. Trading carries the risk of losing money.

Lesson topics

Plan the trade

Before any pattern has a name: the conditional plan you are willing to act on, the levels that plan refers to, and the independent evidence that decides whether the idea is worth taking at all. Everything downstream is written against what you decide here.

None of the 15 lessons marked complete

  1. IF THEN UNLESS PLAN
    Planning Interactive lab

    Trade Thesis

    Build a conditional trade plan from context, setup, trigger, invalidation, target, and no-trade conditions.

    Open lesson
    Not marked
  2. RESISTANCE SUPPORT FLIP
    Levels Interactive lab

    Support and Resistance

    Place support and resistance zones, classify reactions, and distinguish rejection from acceptance and role reversal.

    Open lesson
    Not marked
  3. 4/5 EVIDENCE SCORE
    Evidence Interactive lab

    Confluence

    Evaluate setup quality using independent evidence from context, location, trigger, participation, and relative performance.

    Open lesson
    Not marked

Lesson topics

Recognize the setup

The three shapes a tradable idea keeps arriving in. Each lesson replays the version that works and the version that fails — the failed breakout, the pullback that was really a reversal — so the difference is something you have watched happen rather than something you have read about.

  1. BREAK RETEST
    Setups Interactive lab

    Breakout Setups

    Replay confirmed, retested, failed, and crowded breakouts and evaluate entry, wait, or no-trade decisions.

    Open lesson
    Not marked
  2. PULLBACK CONTINUE
    Setups Interactive lab

    Pullback Setups

    Explore pullback depth, structural validity, reaction evidence, and local structure shifts for bullish and bearish setups.

    Open lesson
    Not marked
  3. LOWER HIGH BREAK
    Setups Interactive lab

    Reversal Setups

    Advance through trend maturity, reaction, structure break, retest, and continuation to evaluate reversal candidates.

    Open lesson
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Lesson topics

Execute it

Turning a recognized setup into an actual order: the candle that triggers the entry, the level whose breach says the idea was wrong, and the levels where money comes off the table. Three decisions that all have to be made before the fill, not after it.

  1. TRIGGER ENTRY
    Entries Interactive lab

    Entry Confirmation

    Compare reaction, structure-shift, and retest entry models and select the first candle that satisfies each rule.

    Open lesson
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  2. STOP RISK ENTRY
    Invalidation Interactive lab

    Stop-Loss Placement

    Drag a stop line around structural invalidation, assess volatility room, and see how distance changes illustrative position size.

    Open lesson
    Not marked
  3. 3R 2R 1R ENTRY
    Exits Interactive lab

    Profit Targets

    Place structural targets, compare R multiples, and evaluate single-target, scale-out, and trailing-remainder plans.

    Open lesson
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Lesson topics

Size and manage it

What the trade is worth and how it gets run. The arithmetic that says whether the plan pays for its own risk, the quantity that expresses it without betting the account, and the candle-by-candle decisions that come after the fill — measured against the plan you already wrote.

  1. 1R 3R RISK REWARD BREAK-EVEN WIN RATE
    Expectancy Interactive lab

    Risk-to-Reward

    Calculate risk, reward, break-even win rate, and expectancy for adjustable long and short trade plans.

    Open lesson
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  2. EQUITY 1% RISK STOP DISTANCE MAX QTY
    Sizing Interactive lab

    Position Sizing

    Calculate maximum share and long-option quantities from equity, risk percentage, stop distance, premium loss, and costs.

    Open lesson
    Not marked
  3. SCALE OUT TRAIL
    Management Interactive lab

    Trade Management

    Simulate candle-by-candle holding, scaling, break-even stops, trailing, and exits while scoring adherence to a predefined plan.

    Open lesson
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Lesson topics

Test, record, review

Evidence about your own trading rather than about the market: test the rules on a sample before risking anything, record every trade in a structured journal, then read that record for the one thing worth changing. Trading Journal and Performance Review are two halves of the same workflow and share a file format.

  1. IN SAMPLE OUT
    Testing Interactive lab

    Backtesting

    Generate synthetic trade samples, inspect equity, drawdown, distributions, and compare in-sample with out-of-sample results.

    Open lesson
    Not marked
  2. DATE · SETUP · R JSON
    Records Interactive lab

    Trading Journal

    Create, edit, store, import, and export structured trade journal entries with R outcomes, adherence, execution scores, and mistake tags.

    Open lesson
    Not marked
  3. BY SETUP ONE RULE
    Review Interactive lab

    Performance Review

    Import journal data, filter and segment performance, compare adherence, diagnose recurring mistakes, and generate one measurable improvement rule.

    Open lesson
    Not marked

Recommended background

Price structure, support and resistance, pullbacks, and invalidation levels.

Interop

Trading Journal and Performance Review share one file format

The journal and the review are two halves of one workflow, so the record written by Trading Journal is the input to Performance Review — no retyping, and no third-party service in between.

Format: trade-journal-v1

How the handoff works

Trading Journal keeps your entries in your own browser's local storage and exports them as a JSON document stamped trade-journal-v1. Performance Review picks the same stored journal up automatically when it is there, and will also read an exported trade-journal-v1 file you choose from disk — so a journal kept on one machine can be reviewed on another. Both pages run entirely in the browser: nothing is uploaded, and there is no account anywhere in this course.

The schema linked beside this is the contract between them. It is worth reading if you would rather keep the journal in your own spreadsheet or script and only bring it here for the review: match the shape and Performance Review will read it.