Your paper-trading routine

Lesson ten: your paper-trading routine. You've learned how the market works, how to keep risk small, and how to read and manage Bentley's setups. Now you'll turn all of it into one daily routine, and a journal that tells you the truth.

The routine is a loop you run once a day: check, choose, plan, manage and log. It starts in Bentley's public report. First, check the weather: the Market regime for your coin. Then the week ahead. If big economic news from the United States is due, open no new trades from thirty minutes before to thirty minutes after. Next, read the setups. Check when they were written, because most go stale within hours. Read the Wrong if line first. And the score is confidence, not the odds of winning.

Now choose one setup, or none. None is a perfectly good answer. Look only at setups that fit the regime, and skip any entry that's already missed. Write your plan in the journal before price reaches the entry zone, sized at one percent risk. Then manage it on paper, like in lesson nine. Take half off at target one and move your stop to break-even. Close early if its Wrong if line comes true. Never widen the stop. When it's over, log the result the same day.

The journal is where your routine turns into evidence. Every trade gets one row, and you fill it in twice. Before the trade: the date, the coin, long or short, the setup, entry, stop, targets and size, and one line on why. After it ends: what happened, the result in dollars, and one yes or no question. Did you follow your plan? Always write the first half before you enter. Once a trade is open, it's easy to remember a different plan.

Paper trading has one big weakness. It's easy to cheat, and nobody would know. Moving a stop after price has already hit it. Leaving out a loss you'd rather forget. Adding a trade you only took in your head, after it worked. Each one makes your journal look better than your trading really is. So the rules are strict. Log every trade. Never rewrite the plan once a trade is open. And never delete a row.

Honest scoring means two grades for every trade. One for the result: did it make or lose money? One for the process: did you follow your plan? Together, they make four boxes. Followed the plan and won: good. Followed the plan and lost: also good. Your stop did its job. Broke a rule and lost: that's the one to fix. And broke a rule and won? That's the most dangerous box, because it pays you for a bad habit.

One trade, or even five, tells you almost nothing. Review in batches of twenty to thirty trades. Remember lesson six: at two to one reward to risk, being right one time in three is enough to break even, before fees. So losing streaks are normal, even with a sound plan. After each batch, ask three questions. How often did you follow your plan? Which setups and regimes did your losses come from? What one rule will you change next? Judge Bentley's setups the same way, a batch at a time. Results depend on how each trader manages them.

When does real money come in? Not yet. Paper is the easy version. With nothing at stake, holding a stop feels simple. With real money, every rule gets harder to keep. If you can't follow your plan on paper, real money won't fix that. It makes it worse. Before it's even a question, you'd want several honest batches, with your plan followed nearly every time and results that held up. Even then, nothing is guaranteed. There's no deadline. The market will still be here.

Let's recap. Once a day, run the loop: check, choose, plan, manage and log. Write the plan first, log every trade, and grade each one twice: result and process. Review in batches of twenty to thirty, and let real money wait. Start today: log your first five paper trades in the journal on this page. That's the end of Bentley Academy. Bentley is your co-pilot, and the decisions are yours. And remember, this course is education only, not financial advice.