The Weekly Swing Routine

Swing trading means buying a stock or fund and holding it for days to a few weeks, trying to catch one solid move — a swing — instead of dozens of tiny moves in a single day. If you finished Level 1 and Level 2, you know the instruments, the orders, and the risk rules. This module is about something different: the operating system — the weekly routine that turns swing trading from a stressful hobby into a calm, organized process.

Here is the honest promise up front. Swing trading's biggest advantage is not money. It is time. A day trader (someone who opens and closes every trade the same day) is chained to a screen for hours. A swing trader does most of the real thinking in one focused weekend session, spends ten to fifteen minutes on weekday evenings keeping things in order, and lets the market come to them. That is the lifestyle edge — but it only exists if you actually run the routine. A swing trader without a routine is just a day trader who checks prices all day and sleeps badly.

The Shape of the Week

The whole routine fits on one page. Learn the shape first; the rest of this module fills in each block.

Notice what is missing: no block called "watch charts all day." That is deliberate. During market hours your job is mostly to do nothing. Your plans were written when you were calm; the market's job during the week is to come to your prices — not the other way around.

The Weekend Session: Where the Trading Actually Happens

The weekend session is the heart of the system. Sixty to ninety minutes, same time every week, phone away. It has four parts, in a fixed order: regime check, position review, watchlist building, and calendar check.

Part 1: The Market Regime Check (10 minutes)

A regime is the market's current personality — trending up, trending down, or chopping sideways. The same trade that works beautifully in an uptrend can bleed money in chop, because in chop prices reverse instead of following through.

You check the regime on weekly charts — charts where each candle (the box showing a period's open, high, low, and close prices) represents one full week. Weekly candles filter out daily noise and show the real direction. Look at a broad market fund like an S&P 500 ETF (a fund holding all 500 big US companies that trades like one stock) and a Nasdaq-100 ETF (100 big Nasdaq companies, heavily technology). Ask three questions:

• Is price above or below its long-term average line (a 40-week average, roughly the famous 200-day average)? Above suggests a friendly environment; below suggests defense.
• Are the weekly candles making higher highs and higher lows (an uptrend), lower highs and lower lows (a downtrend), or neither (sideways)?
• Did anything change versus last week, or is this the same regime continuing?

Write the answer in one sentence in your journal: "Regime: uptrend, friendly" or "Regime: sideways chop, be picky." That sentence controls how aggressive the rest of the session may be. In a friendly regime you might plan five or six candidates. In a hostile one, the correct plan might be two — or none.

Part 2: Review Open Positions Against Their Plans (15 minutes)

Every position you already hold was opened with a written plan: an entry price, a stop (the price where you admit you are wrong and exit), and a target (the price where you plan to take profit). The weekend review holds each position up against its own plan and asks:

• Is the original reason for the trade still true? (Reasons belong to whatever method you trade — the Academy teaches process, not a strategy. You wrote a reason down, so check it.)
• Where is price now relative to the stop and the target? Do the exit orders need adjusting, or are they already working exactly as planned?
• How many days has the trade been open, and is that still inside the time you planned to give it?

Example. You bought 50 shares of a fictional stock, Harbor Lights Inc. (HLIT), at $40, with a stop at $37 and a target at $46. Your risk is ($40 − $37) × 50 = $150, and your planned reward is ($46 − $40) × 50 = $300 — twice the risk, which traders write as 2R, where R means the dollar amount you planned to risk on the trade. It is now the weekend and HLIT closed Friday at $42.50. The entry reason is still intact, the stop order is working at $37, and the position is up $125 on paper. Verdict: nothing to do. Most weekend reviews end exactly like that — nothing to do — and that is a feature, not a bug.

Part 3: Build the Watchlist — With the Whole Plan Written (30–40 minutes)

A watchlist is your short list of stocks or funds you might trade this week. The rule that separates swing traders from gamblers: a candidate does not make the list unless its entire plan is written before the week starts. For every candidate you write five things:

• Ticker and what the company or fund is, in one line
• The exact price (or price zone) where you would enter
• The stop price
• The target price
• The position size, calculated from your risk rule — never guessed

Position size comes from your risk budget. Say your account is $10,000 and your rule is to risk at most 1% per trade — $100. A candidate triggers at $25 with a stop at $23.50, so the risk per share is $1.50. Size = $100 ÷ $1.50 = 66.6, rounded down to 66 shares, costing 66 × $25 = $1,650. If it works to a $29 target, you make 66 × $4 = $264 (about 2.6R). If it fails, you lose about $99 — the planned 1%, nothing more.

Keep the list short: three to six candidates is plenty. A list of thirty names is not preparation; it is a guarantee you will chase whichever one moves first. And respect stacking: five technology stocks are not five separate bets — related stocks tend to fall together, so count them as roughly one position when you think about total risk.

Part 4: Check Next Week's Calendar (10 minutes)

Two calendars matter.

• Earnings calendar. Earnings are a company's scheduled quarterly report card. Single stocks routinely jump or drop 5–15% overnight on earnings — straight through stops. For every open position and candidate, check the earnings date. Many swing traders refuse to hold a single stock through its earnings unless that gamble is the deliberate, sized-for plan. A surprise you could have seen on a calendar is not bad luck; it is a skipped step.
• Economic calendar. Government reports — the monthly jobs report, inflation reports, and the Federal Reserve's interest-rate decisions (the Fed is the US central bank) — move the whole market at once. You do not need to predict them. You need to know they are coming, so a wild Wednesday does not feel like a personal attack.

Write both into your journal: "ACME reports Tuesday after the close — decision: exit Monday or size for a gap. Fed decision Wednesday 2 PM — expect a choppy day market-wide."

Weekday Maintenance: Ten to Fifteen Minutes, Then Done

Weekday evenings are maintenance, not analysis. Open the journal and the broker app, and run the same short checklist:

• Did any alert fire today? If yes, did the plan's order handle it, or does something need your decision tonight?
• Are all stop and target orders still working (actually live in the account) for every open position?
• Did any position close today? If so, write the one-line journal entry now, while it is fresh.
• Anything on tomorrow's calendar — earnings or a big report — that affects a position?

Then close the app. That is the whole job.

The discipline hiding inside this section: your orders do the trading during the day. If your plan says enter at $25, an order can be resting at $25 (a limit order — an instruction to buy or sell only at your price or better) while you are at work, at the gym, or asleep. If your plan says exit at $23.50, a stop order is already sitting there. Watching changes nothing except your stress level — and stressed traders move stops, cancel targets, and invent 11 AM trades their calm Sunday selves never approved.

Alert Discipline: Let the Market Come to You

A price alert is a notification your broker or chart app sends when a stock reaches a price you chose. Alerts are the swing trader's eyes during the day — but only if they are set with discipline.

• Alert at plan levels only. Set alerts at your written entry zones, stops, and targets — the prices where a decision actually exists. Three to six alerts a week is normal.
• Never alert at every wiggle. An alert at "any 2% move" fires constantly, trains you to check prices all day, and quietly turns you back into a day trader with worse information. Alert fatigue is real: after the fortieth buzz, you stop reading the important ones.- An alert is information, not an instruction. When one fires, the correct response is usually "good — the order is handling it" or "noted for tonight." The alert does not mean do something now; it means the plan you wrote is meeting the market, exactly as designed.

The Friday Close-Out Review

Friday after the market closes (4 PM Eastern), spend twenty to thirty minutes closing the books on the week. This is where improvement actually comes from — not from finding better stocks, but from auditing your own behavior. Journal four things:

• Positions opened and closed this week, with entry, exit, and the planned R for each.
• Results in R multiples. Forget dollars for a moment; grade in R. A $99 loss on a $100 plan is −1R (normal, expected, fine). A $264 win on that plan is +2.6R. R keeps a $5,000 account and a $50,000 account honest on the same scale.
• Rule breaks. Every single one, written down without excuses: "Moved my stop down Tuesday because I 'felt' it would come back. Cost an extra 0.8R." Rule breaks are the most valuable data you own — they point at you, not the market.
• One sentence on the regime and whether next weekend's session needs to adjust anything.

A sample week in R: closed three trades, +2.6R, −1R, −1R → net +0.6R. In dollars on a $100 risk size that is roughly +$60 — a boring, perfectly decent week. Notice the shape: one good winner paid for two normal losers with a little left over. That asymmetry — small planned losses, occasional bigger wins — is the engine of swing trading, and you can only see it if the journal exists.

A Model Week, Day by Day

Here is the whole routine running on one fictional week. Account: $10,000. Risk rule: 1% ($100) per trade. Open position coming in: the HLIT trade from earlier (50 shares from $40, stop $37, target $46).

Read that week again and notice how little happened at the screen. Two plans were written calmly, one earnings landmine was dodged by a calendar, one entry and one exit were executed by resting orders, and the wildest day of the week — a Fed day — required nothing at all. That is the system working exactly as designed.

Common Mistakes at This Level

• Skipping the weekend session, then improvising all week. Every mid-week "idea" feels urgent and is usually just boredom or fear wearing a costume.
• Planning entries but not exits. A candidate without a written stop and target is not a plan; it is a hope with a ticker symbol.
• Setting alerts everywhere. Alerts at every wiggle rebuild the day-trading habit you became a swing trader to escape — and the chart-staring quietly returns.
• Overriding orders during the day. Moving a stop "just this once" converts a planned −1R loss into an unplanned −3R loss. Twice a month, that is your entire expected profit, gone.
• Holding single stocks through earnings by accident. The date was published weeks ahead. Check the calendar; decide on purpose.
• Stacking correlated positions. Five tech swings that all fall together on the same bad day are one position wearing five tickers.
• Judging the week in dollars instead of R and rule-following. A profitable week with three rule breaks is a bad week that got lucky. A −1.5R week with zero rule breaks is the system working. Grade the behavior; the money follows over months.
• Never journaling. Without the Friday review there is no feedback loop — you will repeat your most expensive mistake roughly forever.

Chapter Summary

• Swing trading's edge is a time structure: one deep planning session, brief daily maintenance, and a weekly self-audit — not screen time.- The weekend session (60–90 minutes) has four fixed parts: regime check on weekly charts, review of open positions against their written plans, a short watchlist where every candidate already has entry, stop, target, and size written, and a check of next week's earnings and economic calendars.
• Position size is calculated from a fixed risk rule (for example 1% of the account): shares = dollar risk ÷ (entry − stop). Related positions in the same sector count as one bet.

• Overnight gap risk is the defining danger of swinging; stops become market orders after a gap, so modest size is the real protection.
• Weekday maintenance is 10–15 minutes in the evening: confirm alerts, orders, and closures — then close the app. Resting orders execute the plan during the day.
• Alerts belong only at plan levels where a decision exists. An alert is information, not an instruction to act.
• The Friday close-out review journals positions, results in R multiples, and every rule break. Grade behavior first; dollars follow.
• The model week shows the payoff: roughly two hours total, most decisions made calmly on Sunday, and the market's wildest day requiring nothing from you.

Check Yourself

1. What are the four parts of the weekend session, in order?
2. Your account is $10,000, your risk rule is 1%, and a candidate enters at $25 with a stop at $23.50. How many shares do you buy, and what do you lose if the stop fills?
3. Why does a stop order not fully protect a swing trader, and what actually controls that risk?
4. Why should alerts be set only at plan levels instead of on every price move?
5. In the model week, the HLIT trade risked $150 and made $300. What is that result in R, and why does the Friday review grade in R instead of dollars?

Show answers

Answers: 1) Regime check on weekly charts, review of open positions against their written plans, watchlist building with complete plans (entry, stop, target, size), and checking next week's earnings and economic calendars. 2) Risk per share is $1.50 and your budget is $100, so $100 ÷ $1.50 = 66 shares (rounded down); if the stop fills you lose about 66 × $1.50 = $99 — the planned 1%. 3) Because of overnight gaps: if the stock opens below your stop, the stop becomes a market order at the open and fills at the worse price. Modest position size — planning for a worse-than-planned loss — is what controls it. 4) Because an alert should mark a price where a real decision exists. Alerting on every wiggle creates constant interruptions, pulls you back into all-day chart watching, and breeds alert fatigue until you ignore the important ones. 5) +2R. R measures every trade against its own planned risk, so results are comparable across prices, sizes, and account balances — and it grades whether you followed the plan, the part you control.