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Trading Guide: The Daily Routine

Where are the best opportunities right now — and how do you get from a two-minute morning scan to a position that's ranked for conviction, confirmed by regime and positioning, stress-tested against a real shock, and sized to a loss you can live with? This guide is a single repeatable routine that answers exactly that: scan the open, surface ideas, confirm conviction, rank for confluence, structure the trade, stress-test it, size it, and track it. Each step names the exact screen to open and the signal it gives you; the routine is ordered so each step narrows the field for the next. It assumes basic trading vocabulary — unfamiliar terms are glossed inline on first use, with full definitions in the Analytics Glossary.

The eight-step morning routine

1. Morning scan: the Trading Dashboard — Open the Trading Dashboard, your live cockpit for the session: a Ticker Bar of price moves across everything you follow, a red DE-RISK Alerts banner naming markets that just turned riskier, Regime Signals with the model's confidence in each read, Daily Forecast Signals across seven horizons from 1 to 90 days, a COT Sentiment scanner comparing commercial hedgers to speculators, StatArb setups where a usually-linked pair has drifted apart, and Futures Curve Shape for a fast read on contango versus backwardation. Start with the DE-RISK banner, sweep the Ticker Bar for anything unusual, then note any forecast signals or StatArb setups worth a closer look. This is a triage pass, not a decision — you're building a shortlist.
2. Confirm the state: Regime + Daily Signals — For each name on your shortlist, open the daily forecast — all seven horizons, each wrapped in a confidence band — alongside the market's current regime. The regime has to agree with the trade you're considering: a calm, rising regime supports a patient long, while a turbulent one says size down or wait. Read the band's width as the trade's expected noise, not just the central line — a wide band means you should demand a bigger edge before committing.
3. Read the smart money: COT Sentiment — Check open interest, net speculative positioning, and the bullish/bearish gauge for each shortlisted name, then compare which way the gauge leans against your own idea's direction. Alignment with the largest participants adds conviction. A position that's crowded on the opposite side is a warning that you may be early — or wrong.
4. Rank conviction: Smart Flow — Open Smart Flow, an anomaly detector scanning positioning, volume, volatility, regime, and correlation at once, and filter for Grade A or B signals with a clear direction. A high Strength reading marks an unusually extreme single move, and the Detectors list tells you exactly why a signal fired so you can sanity-check it against what you already saw on the dashboard. Grade measures confluence — how many independent checks agree — so rank by Grade first and use Strength to break ties within a grade; this is what turns this morning's shortlist into a ranked set of ideas.
5. Structure a pair trade: the StatArb Cointegration Matrix — Open the StatArb Cointegration Matrix for pairs of commodities that are statistically tethered but have drifted apart, each carrying a Z-score, a Signal telling you which leg to short and which to long, a half-life in days, a correlation reading, an ADF p-value, and a hedge beta; switch the lookback window between one and five years. Look for a widely stretched Z-score paired with a short half-life, read the Signal for direction and the hedge beta for the ratio between the two legs, then export the candidate to the War Room. This is a market-neutral trade — you're betting the stretched spread reverts, not betting on market direction.
6. Stress-test it: the War Room — Describe a shock in plain English, or pick a preset — a supply cut at a major exporter, a pipeline-gas cutoff, a demand slowdown in a major consuming economy, a producer-group output cut, or stagflation. The simulator propagates the shock through the correlation network and ranks the hardest-hit commodities, with projected price moves plus changes in volatility and regime. For a pair trade this is the check that matters most: do both legs move together under stress, so the hedge holds, or do they split apart? If a plausible shock would blow through your stop, size smaller or pass — and save the scenario so you can re-run it later.
7. Size it to your risk budget: the Risk Dashboard — Open the Risk Dashboard for per-commodity Value-at-Risk and Expected Shortfall, a VIX gauge of broad market stress, and a VIX-adjusted VaR that scales the risk estimate to current conditions. Read VaR as the bound on a normal bad month and Expected Shortfall as what you should size against for the tail; when the VIX gauge is elevated, lean on the VIX-adjusted figure so your sizing reflects today's stress rather than a calm-market average. This step turns an idea into a position sized to a loss you can actually hold.
8. Track it: the Trading Desk (equities) — Open the Trading Desk for the equities side: a Universe table of tickers with returns and realised volatility filterable by sector, a Leaderboard ranked by a single composite score, House Funds with NAV history to benchmark against, and custom Portfolios you build yourself. Build a Portfolio of the names you've decided to trade and track it over time; each ticker's own forecast, regime, and risk pages let you apply the same discipline you used on commodities. This is where an idea becomes part of a tracked book rather than a one-off call.

Smart Flow signal tags

Those four tags are all you need to triage the screen at speed. The detectors behind them, the way Grade and Strength interact, and what to do with a signal once you have found one are covered in full in Smart Flow: Anomaly Signals.

StatArb metrics cheat sheet

That is the cheat sheet for the screen. The pair-selection discipline behind it — what makes a tether worth trusting, how to set the hedge ratio, and where a pair trade goes wrong — is set out in Correlations, Hedging & Statistical Arbitrage.

The discipline checklist

• Scan the Trading Dashboard and Smart Flow for Grade-A signals every morning.
• Confirm the call with the regime state and COT positioning before you trust it.
• Find a stretched, fast-reverting pair on the StatArb Cointegration Matrix.
• Stress-test it in the War Room against the shocks that could break it.
• Size it on the Risk Dashboard so it fits your risk budget — tighter when the VIX is elevated.
• Track it in a Portfolio on the Trading Desk as part of your book.

The discipline is the edge. Every position you put on this way has been ranked for conviction, confirmed by the regime and the smart money, stress-tested against a real shock, and sized to a loss you can live with.