Trading Operations

Read these first

1. 01The Pre-Open Checklist

   The hour before the bell is where most avoidable losses are prevented. A written pre-open checklist turns "did I remember?" into "did I tick it?", and its job is to catch the problems that are already sitting in your book before you place a single order.

2. 02The Shape Of A Trading Day

   A trading day is not one long stretch of the same activity. Liquidity, volatility and the quality of your signals change hour by hour in a pattern reliable enough to plan around, and most of the discipline of running a book is doing the thing the current hour is actually good for.

3. 03Handling A Corporate Action On A Live Book

   A corporate action rewrites the terms of something you already own, without you trading. Share counts, prices, resting orders, hedge ratios and price history all have to be rewritten with it, in the same way, at the same time, or your book and your systems quietly stop agreeing.

4. 04What To Watch On The Risk Screen All Day

   A live risk screen shows you forty numbers and you have six and a half hours. This is which five actually predict trouble, how to read them in units of a normal day, and how to tell a bad hour apart from a broken book while there is still time to do something.

Then the rest

1. 05Blotter Hygiene: Keeping The Order Record Clean
2. 06Going Flat: When And How To Square Up
3. 07Managing The Futures Roll
4. 08Reconciling Positions With Your Prime Broker
5. 09Reviewing Overnight Risk Before The Open
6. 10Running A Trading Incident Post-Mortem
7. 11Running The Book Through Expiry
8. 12Settlement Cycles, Fails And Buy-Ins
9. 13Start-Of-Day Positions And The SOD File
10. 14Trading Through An Ex-Dividend Date
11. 15When The Exchange Or Your Line Goes Down
12. 16Working An Index Rebalance Day
13. 17Deciding What To Leave For The Close
14. 18End-Of-Day Marking And Sign-Off
15. 19Trade Capture And Booking Errors
16. 20Trading The First Fifteen Minutes