Find the Setup & Execute in Four Minutes

Thousands of assets trade every morning. Almost none are worth your time today. Your job isn't to analyse everything — it's to filter ruthlessly down to the one or two that earn an A or a B. Here's the funnel, top to bottom.

The five-step funnel#

1 · Read the regime. Before a single chart. Goldilocks? Then equities, tech, commodities are your field — and you've just deleted half the universe (bonds, utilities, the dollar) in thirty seconds. This alone puts you ahead of most retail traders, who buy whatever's trending on their feed.

2 · Scan for trends. Inside the favoured groups, look for what's already going up — higher highs, higher lows — not what "looks cheap." Buying a stock down 40% because it "can't go lower" is catching a falling knife; it can always fall another 40% — and a falling price isn't just a number, it actively damages the business (capital dries up, talent leaves, customers wobble), so a down-40% stock isn't a bargain, it's a company the market is rejecting in real time. Momentum is durable for the same reason trends exist — institutions accumulate over weeks (the mechanism from Price Is Primary) — so what's rising tends to keep rising. The trend is your friend until the data says otherwise.

3 · Find the entry zone. You do not chase. A semiconductor name gaps up 12% on earnings, the forums scream "200!", everyone buys the open — and two hours later it rolls over and gives the whole gap back. The urgency is a lie; markets hand you a setup every week. Instead you wait for the pullback to support — the level that held the last two or three times price dipped. That cluster is where you buy.

4 · Confirm the signal. Four things lining up at the edge: price holding support, selling volume drying up, momentum stretched oversold, volatility compressed. A stock coiling tight on fading volume at support is loading energy. When they align, you have a confirmed entry — not "soon," now.

5 · Grade it. Both halves aligned, trend intact, no earnings or rate decision in the way → A. One element slightly off → B, smaller and tighter. Anything less, you skip. There's no "close enough" — close enough is how accounts bleed out slowly enough that you don't notice.

A real morning#

Tuesday, Goldilocks. You open a watchlist of 30 tech names. Eighteen are in clean uptrends — the other twelve are gone. Of the eighteen, seven are pulling back to support — the rest are extended or broken. Of the seven, three have a confirmed signal. One stands out: strong earnings momentum, a support level that's held three times, no events for two weeks. Grade A. The level: entry 224.50, exit 238.00. You set a buy limit at 224.50, a sell limit at 238.00, and close the app. Total time: twenty minutes. If it never reaches 224.50 today, nothing happens — you don't chase, you don't move the entry. Tomorrow you run it again. Patience is built into the process.

The daily process and its rules#

Each morning you hold three things per asset: an entry, an exit, and a grade. Set the two limits, walk away. The hard rules:

• Update the exit daily. Yesterday's level is dead; it priced yesterday's market. Always trade today's number.
• No trailing stops. They trigger on an arbitrary pullback, hand you a mediocre exit, then watch the trade go where you knew it would. Commit to the trade or don't take it.
• A downgrade is an exit. This is the one that saves accounts. You're long USD/JPY, nicely in profit, still Grade A — then one morning it drops to Grade B: the Bank of Japan has signalled a policy shift, the macro has cracked. Every instinct says hold ("maybe it's temporary"). You take your profit and leave, no negotiation — grade down, get out. Two weeks later the pair falls 400 pips on a surprise announcement. The discipline saved you, not the forecast.
• Not every day is a trade. Some mornings nothing fills. You log in, check, log out. That's a normal, profitable day.