How to Build a Weekly News Routine

A weekly news routine in five lines

A weekly routine for the news fits in twenty minutes on Sunday and one minute a day. On Sunday evening you open the calendar for the week ahead and keep only the high-importance rows in the currencies you trade. You write the map, one line per day, with the minute in the feed's time and the name of the release, and nothing else. You set the bells, a time alert one minute before each red minute, five bells rather than fifty. Each morning you read that day's line and check nothing has been added; on Friday evening you look back at which minutes moved and which did not, and cross them off. The routine is not reading the news. It is knowing, before the week, which minutes the news will land in.

A pinboard with five cards

Picture a pinboard above the desk with five cards on it, one per weekday, pinned on Sunday evening from the calendar. Each card carries one minute in feed time and one name: Monday 17:00, the factory survey; Tuesday 15:30, the inflation number; Wednesday 21:00, the Fed; Thursday 15:30, the weekly claims; Friday 15:30, the jobs report, as an example week. The board is read in a second every morning. Nothing on it says what the numbers will be or which way the price will go; it says when, which is the only part of the news that can be known on a Sunday.

This paper is locked