Related-market checklist, session filter, and ATR-scaled stop

Restart after a complete loss

After a complete 1987 loss across stocks, futures, and options that could not be cross-margined, the case restarted with far smaller size, fewer trades, and shorter holding periods.

Editorial: the archive is most useful when those later choices are read as one procedure, not as separate market stories. Related-market confirmation writes the signal, session tape and the open write the filter, and an atr-scaled stop writes the loss bound before size is added.

Related-market confirmation before size

The pre-trade checklist treats a market as tradeable only when it is moving in sync with a fixed related-market set. That related-market confirmation is required before a signal is allowed.

A new low in one index is treated as more informative when a related index also prints a new low.

Time and price moving together is the rule input that classifies a market as buy, sell, or stay out before size is added. Stay-out classification is an explicit abstention output of the same procedure that produces entries and exits, used when time and price do not confirm.

Dislocation is not an independent trend

When two related grain contracts were limit-down and a third opened higher, the case treated the dislocation as a short setup rather than an independent uptrend.

Session clock and the open-relative filter

The open is used as a session filter. Current price is read against the session open, including overseas opens, rather than only against the prior close. That open-relative filter is how the case judges the print in the session that is actually trading.

The case maps a 24-hour session clock from 3:30 p.m. to 3:15 p.m. Central into Far East, Europe, and a two-part United States session. It treats 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Central as a transition interval.

The time-and-price tape treats aligned time and price as an executable state and treats misalignment as a reason not to act.

Tick-volume alignment during the session

A long-side signal is defined as trend, tick, and volume pointing the same way during that session, not as a search for divergence. That tick-volume alignment is used as a filter.

The ordinary tick is treated as New York-only, so a broader tick covering the global session is substituted.

Bound the loss, then build in three elements

The atr-scaled stop is set as one third of that market’s average true range so the loss distance is bounded before the trade is placed and while it is open.

Once in, the position is built with a three-element add: a first slice of up to one third for confirmation, a second slice aimed at about twice the accepted risk, and a remainder held for the fuller move. The same split is described as applying beyond a single session.