Pre-Trade Checklist Generator: Check the Plan First

This pre-trade checklist generator builds a set of prompts from your trading style and strategy choices. Use them to write down the setup, planned loss, exit conditions and reasons to skip a trade. The Readiness Score does not measure your readiness: the form never asks whether checks passed, how you feel or what your trade prices are. It cannot approve a trade or certify compliance.

Choose the template, then supply the evidence yourself

• Trading Style selects among intraday index, option buying, option selling, swing and positional labels.
• Strategy Type selects trend following, mean reversion [price returning toward its average], breakout [price moving beyond a range], range trading or mixed strategies.
• Risk Management Style lists fixed percentage, fixed rupee, ATR [average true range] and option-premium choices.
• Include Emotional Check controls whether psychology prompts appear in Core Checks.
• Include Market Context Check adds a context group when enabled; Basic and Detailed currently produce the same group.

Some menu choices share a template. Option buying and selling use the longer-holding template, range and mixed choices use the trend template, and the listed risk styles currently lead to the same stored risk setting. Selecting a label therefore does not create a specialised option risk calculation or enter your actual rupee budget.

The outputs include Pre-Market Check, Entry Rule, Exit Rule, Position Size, Time Check, Core Checks and Risk Checks, plus a total item count and the readiness label. They are text prompts. No chart, news article, broker balance or order ticket is examined.

A checklist you can answer before entry

Read each generated prompt as a question, then write the evidence beside it in your own notes. A sentence such as “position size calculated correctly” is still unchecked until you have written the quantity, stop distance and money at risk. The generator has no tick-box record of completed checks.

• Setup: name the strategy and the exact condition required for entry. Record what would invalidate it.
• Contract: confirm the instrument, expiry and quantity in the actual order ticket.
• Loss plan: write the entry, stop, quantity, estimated costs and total planned loss.
• Exit: describe profit-taking, a time-based exit and what happens if price gaps through the planned stop.
• Exposure: note open positions that could lose at the same time as the new trade.
• Events: check relevant scheduled announcements yourself and note the source and time.
• Behaviour: write whether the decision comes from your setup, an impulse or an attempt to recover a loss.

These are suggested record fields, rather than additional controls hidden in the generator. Replace prompts that do not fit your method. For example, an option-premium stop and an underlying-price condition need different calculations and should not be mixed into a single unexplained point distance.

Sample pre-trade checklist for intraday trades

Copy this list into your notes, delete what does not fit your method, and write an answer beside each line. A line with no answer counts as unchecked.

• Setup name and the exact condition that triggered it.
• What would make the setup invalid, and the price where I will know.
• Entry, stop and target, written down before the order.
• Quantity, and the rupee loss if the stop is hit, including estimated charges.
• Is my total risk today still inside my daily loss limit?
• Any open position that could lose at the same time?
• Any scheduled event in the next hour, with the source I checked?
• Am I trading this setup or trying to win back an earlier loss?
• Where will I exit if the trade goes nowhere by a set time?

Nine lines is only an example. Pick a length you will actually complete, because a long list gets skipped. A list you can answer in a couple of minutes is more likely to be used.

Checklists for swing trades and for option buying

Different trades carry different risks, so the lines change.

For options, write the premium stop and the underlying price condition as two separate lines. Also check the lot size from the exchange's current list rather than from memory. For event days, see expiry day trading.

Worked example: the score can stay high with nothing checked

For this example, select Intraday Nifty/Bank Nifty, Breakout, Fixed Rupee Risk, Yes for Emotional Check and Yes - Detailed for Market Context. The template produces 35 items and a readiness display of 85/100. It does so before you answer any prompt.

The count comes from seven included groups containing five items each: 7 × 5 = 35. The score comes from stored assumptions: 50 + 20 + 10 + 5 = 85. These are tool calculations, not a measured chance of winning or a count of checks you completed.

Switching Emotional Check to No removes that group, leaving 30 items in this example, while the readiness score remains 85/100. The score does not learn whether you are calm, tired or stressed because there is no field for those answers.

For a separate made-up cash-share plan, suppose entry is ₹600, stop is ₹590 and quantity is 40 shares. The planned price loss is (600 − 590) × 40 = ₹400 before costs. If your chosen budget is ₹300, the proposed quantity exceeds that budget by ₹100. This manual arithmetic is the evidence a size check needs; the generator cannot read these trade inputs.

For a cash-share plan like this example, use the stock position size calculator. For index lots, use the risk per trade calculator. The risk reward calculator compares a chosen target with the stop. Record fees and assumed execution prices alongside the figures.

Risk percentages are chosen limits

CME’s educational material describes account-based risk limits and explicitly calls its example percentage arbitrary. A percentage is a planning choice. Nothing in this generator verifies that your chosen risk is appropriate, checks a SEBI rule or makes an order compliant.

Separate a planned loss from a possible realised loss. SEC guidance explains that a triggered stock stop order becomes a market order and that market orders do not guarantee the execution price. The exact order types available to you depend on your broker and market; the checklist does not place or monitor them.

A limit order controls the acceptable execution price but may remain unfilled. A stop level written in notes also does not create an order. Confirm your actual order instructions separately before assuming that a risk-control prompt has been implemented.

Review skipped checks after the trade

Keep the original plan and the actual outcome together. If a check was skipped, record which one, why it was skipped and whether it affected the execution. “I ignored the event calendar” is more reviewable than “bad discipline”. Do not rewrite the original reason after seeing the result.

OneTradeJournal stores trades entered by hand, with stops, targets, strategies, emotions, mistakes and notes. Its separate pre-trade checklist can warn from your recorded history but cannot block an order. This public generator only assembles prompts; it does not inspect that history or control an account.

If volatility is part of your plan, check the limitations of the ATR calculator before relying on its label. A value needs an instrument, interval and method to be interpretable. The same applies to a checklist score: its calculation matters more than its appearance.

A simple pre-market routine

NSE and BSE run a pre-open session from 9:00 to 9:15 AM, and regular trading starts at 9:15 AM, according to Zerodha's support page. In the pre-open, order entry happens first and orders are matched at a single opening price. You do not need to trade in it. Use the time before 9:15 to work through your list.

1. Before the open: note the previous day's close, any big overnight news, and scheduled events for the day.
2. Mark levels: write down the two or three price levels your setups depend on.
3. Set limits: write today's maximum loss and the number of trades you will take.
4. State the plan: write which setups you will trade and which you will skip.
5. At each entry: go through the checklist and write the answers before you place the order.

The pre-market analysis guide covers the first three steps in more detail.

Required and optional items

Mark a few lines as required and the rest as optional. A sensible required core is the stop, the quantity from that stop, the rupee loss, and the exit plan. Everything else, such as event checks or emotional checks, can be optional for small trades and required for larger ones. Write the rule once and do not renegotiate it during the session.

The generator above does not track which items you completed. For a printable copy, you can copy its text into a document or notebook. Keep a tick or a short answer beside each line.

Why traders skip checklist items

• Speed: the price is moving and the list feels like a delay.
• Confidence after a win: the last trade worked, so the checks seem unnecessary.
• Pressure after a loss: the urge to recover makes the plan feel too slow.
• A list that is too long: lines that never change become noise.
• No consequence: if nobody reviews a skipped line, nothing changes.

Fix the cause rather than the person. Shorten the list, put it where you will see it before the order, and log every skip with a reason. After a month, count skips by reason. In OneTradeJournal you can log plan deviation and mistakes on each trade and look at the pattern. The pre-trade checklist there warns but cannot block an order. See trading psychology journal for ways to write skips down.

Sources

• CME Group: Choosing a risk limit (checked 15 October 2026).
• SEC Investor.gov: Types of Orders (checked 15 October 2026).