Desk Routine
Retail traders measure effort in hours at the screen. Professional desks measure it in prepared decisions. Those are not the same quantity, and the gap explains why a trader can sit in front of charts for fifty hours a week and get worse.
A realistic split
| Block | Hours per week | Output |
|---|---|---|
| Live trading windows | 10 to 15 | Executed trades |
| Preparation | 4 | Levels, calendar, plan per instrument |
| Review | 3 | Journal read, one change |
| Research | 4 | Testing one idea properly, not ten badly |
| Off | Everything else | The reason you can do the above next week |
Fifteen hours of live screen time sounds small until you realise the alternative is fifteen hours of trading plus twenty hours of watching positions you should not be watching.
Trade in windows, not in shifts
Choose two windows that match your edge — for most European traders that is the London open and the first ninety minutes of the New York session — and be genuinely absent outside them. The market does not owe you a setup in the hours you happen to be free, and the trades you take out of boredom are systematically your worst.
- 1Define the window by clock time, not by feel.
- 2Close the platform when it ends. Resting orders stay; you do not.
- 3Record how many trades came from inside versus outside the window. The answer usually settles the argument.
Protect the review block like a client meeting
Review is the only block that compounds. It is also the first one cancelled, because it produces no immediate money and it is uncomfortable when the week went badly. Put it on Friday afternoon or Saturday morning, give it a fixed length, and finish with one written change. One. A list of seven improvements is a list of zero improvements.
Rest is a position-sizing decision
Fatigue does not make you lose money directly. It makes you skip the checklist, widen a stop, add to a loser and trade outside your window. Treat sleep and time away from the screen as risk controls with the same standing as your per-trade cap, because functionally that is what they are.
The market is open more hours than you can trade well. Choosing which ones to skip is most of the job.
Written by Adrian Vestberg — former interbank FX dealer, now running a two-person discretionary desk.