by Ken Long

Every day after the market closes I prepare a trading plan for the following day. Every Friday night, I analyze the market conditions on a weekly basis to develop a week long trading strategy that will last entire week.

My combined daily trading plan then incorporates both the weekly and daily preparation. I use a number of methods to generate system signals efficiently for both the daily and weekly trading plans.

Standard stock screens: I have about a dozen standard screens that I can quickly run on a standard set of trading baskets. Because I have named these baskets and named the screens, I can link them together to build more complex screens as needed.

Excel macros: I use defined ranges and standard formatting in combination with Excel macros to automate the production of 30 different reports in various spreadsheets. I hotlink the summary action tables of the various spreadsheets into a Microsoft Word document to generate automatically daily and weekend reports. The macros include a linked set of sorting routines and report printing procedures to standardize repetitive tasks. This saves time, energy and improved accuracy a lot.

Excel visual conditional formatting: by defining the correct area which makes certain conditions highlighted I am able to rapidly source and identify trading targets to meet my requirements.

Maintaining your trading Journal: many of tomorrow’s setups and trade frames result from continuation patterns from today’s setups and trades. Developing familiarity with stocks and ETFs that behave well is a very efficient way to generate trading ideas for tomorrow.

Mastermind sharing: by having a group of like-minded traders who share ideas and a common framework for trading the market, we are able to very efficiently generate a lot of trading ideas from various members.

Staying alert in the moment: since an important part of my trading strategy on an intraday basis is to respond to existing market conditions as they change, I can say that this is an efficient way to generate trading ideas as well.

My mindfulness practice includes maintaining a watch list of all my favorite stocks and ETFs sorted by daily percent gain and loss, which allows me to focus on the extreme winners and losers in order to ride momentum intraday.

I find that having about 10 tradable ideas in mind that are related to market conditions broad indexes favorite stocks and ETFs is more than sufficient to prepare me for the day ahead.

Having the automatically generated daily and weekly reports adds rigor and discipline to my preparation.