Writing A Strategy Someone Else Could Follow

Most traders believe they have a strategy. What they usually have is a set of preferences they can describe out loud and defend after the fact. The two feel identical from the inside. They come apart under one test.

Hand the strategy to someone else. A competent stranger with your written rules, your instrument and nothing else — no access to you, no idea what you meant. Let them trade the week you just traded. Then put the two charts side by side. If the trades do not match, what you own is not a strategy. It is a habit with a vocabulary.

Every place the stranger would have to stop and ask you a question is a place where judgement is hiding.

The point of the test is not that trading should be mechanical, or that judgement is bad. Experienced traders carry a great deal of it. The point is that you cannot review what you never specified.

When a week goes badly you want to answer one question before any other: did I follow the plan, or did I improvise? If the plan says "sell from a strong level with confirmation", that question has no answer. Any trade you took can be made to fit it afterwards, and any trade you skipped can be excused by it. The rule is unfalsifiable, so the review is theatre.

So write the rules as instructions, in the imperative, for a person who cannot ask you anything. Mark this. Wait for that. Do nothing until this specific thing has happened. Then read them back and underline every line where the stranger would be guessing.

The stranger is a device, but the stranger is really you. You at five in the morning. You after a run of losses, when the standard for "clean" quietly drops. You with a position already open and an interest in the next candle. A rule written tightly enough for a stranger is a rule that still means the same thing on those mornings.

Judgement hides in adjectives. It also hides in the parts of your process you perform so automatically that you never thought to write them down.

Setup words are the obvious offenders. Strong level. Clean break. Obvious structure. Decent setup. Each of these is a verdict rather than an observation, and the verdict is delivered by whatever mood you brought to the chart.

Timing words are the next layer. "Wait for confirmation" sounds like a rule and functions as a licence, because confirmation becomes whatever you are willing to accept while you are impatient. "Let it come to you" has no test attached at all.

Sizing words hide the most money. "Size down when the setup is less convincing" means your risk per trade is set by confidence, and confidence is highest exactly when you are least objective about it.

Exit words are where written strategies usually stop entirely. Manage it sensibly. Let the winner run. A stranger reading those two lines would have to invent your entire trade management from scratch.

Then there are the unwritten filters: the sessions you quietly avoid, the hour after a release when you never click, the day of the week you have never once traded well. You already follow these. They belong in the document.

Take one vague line at a time and ask three questions of it. What exactly has to be visible on the chart? On which timeframe? What single thing would make this false?

"Sell from a strong level with confirmation" is a preference. The same idea written as a rule reads differently: mark the level on the 4H before the session opens, and enter only after the hourly closes back below the level you marked before the session. Now a stranger can check it. The hourly either closed below or it did not.

Notice what that is and is not. It is an example of form, not a recommendation of what to trade. Your levels, your timeframes and your triggers are yours. What matters is that each line names an event rather than a feeling.

The second half of every rule is the invalidation. Every rule needs a condition that makes it false, written before the trade rather than discovered during it. A rule that cannot be broken is not doing any work. If nothing on the chart could ever contradict a line in your document, either give that line a boundary or delete it.

The last piece people leave out is the no-trade condition. A written strategy has to say when you do nothing. Without that, doing nothing is never a decision you made — it is only the absence of one, and an absence cannot be reviewed.

Scope comes first: which instrument, which sessions, which timeframes you read and in what order. Preparation next: what you mark on a blank chart, and when you mark it, before price starts moving your opinion around.

Then the trigger, the single observable event that puts you in. Then the invalidation that sits beside it, placed before you enter so that it is not negotiable afterwards.

Then management, the section almost everyone skips. Break-even triggers, partial profits, trailing and scaling, written in the order they apply. What has to happen before the stop moves. How much comes off, and at what point. What makes you leave the position alone and let it work.

Finally the record: the one or two lines you write after every trade so that next month's review has something to read.

That shape is not arbitrary. It is the same end-to-end sequence the MM System teaches — mark, bias, classify, wait, confirm, execute, manage, journal — a blank chart at one end and a closed, logged trade at the other. Where your document has a gap, it will usually sit at one of those eight steps.

A strategy that lives in your head is not a strategy you can audit. The Strategies section inside the member app is where members set theirs out as a written, step-by-step rule set instead of a memory.

Because every strategy is laid out in the same order, the gaps become visible. An empty management step is obvious in a way it never is when the rules are scattered across notes and screenshots. The course modules give you the skeleton to fill: Complete Workflow walks a whole session from blank chart to closed trade, Your Daily SOP sets out the eight-step ritual, and Trade Management covers break-even triggers, partial profits, trailing and scaling.

Use it the way you would use any procedure. Read the strategy before the session, so the rules are fixed while you are calm. Read it again afterwards with your journal beside it, and mark two things: the lines you did not follow, and the lines that turned out to be too vague to follow. Then rewrite those lines. A written strategy is a document you maintain, not one you finish.

Trading carries risk of loss. Every decision you take is your own, and nothing on this page is financial advice.