DT Terminal Scalper/Day Trader Playbook

Do this once, before your first session, and the rest of the playbook runs on its own numbers. Open Settings, connect the account you actually trade from, and let the first sync land your history. MT4 and MT5 connect with a login, futures brokers with a one-click authorise, and crypto exchanges with a read-only API key. The connection can read your fills and nothing else. It cannot place an order, move a stop, or touch your money.

Give every book its own account. A connected broker gets an account of its own, so synced fills never mix with trades you typed by hand, and a Forward Test account sits beside it for the setups you watch but do not take. If you trade a prop challenge, pick the firm and the program on the account card: the daily loss limit, maximum drawdown and target load with it, and the card tells you whether your drawdown is trailing or static.

Decide your rules while you are calm. Write your strategy in the Strategy form, define the tags and instruments you will use, and set the rules a trade can violate. Sync brings the numbers; the rules are the part only you can supply.

Press S for a Structured Journal (guided) or J for a Freeform Journal (flexible). Write the news and events that matter today, the sessions you plan to trade (Asia, London, New York), your starting bias, and your maximum risk for the day. The Pre-Market Briefing loads overnight news and the day's macro events for you, so your plan starts from current context rather than yesterday's narrative.

This sets the mental framework for the day. A written plan is a commitment. It is much harder to deviate from something you wrote down than from a vague idea in your head.

Before you write a word, glance at the account card. Yesterday's fills have already synced, so the balance, the distance to your daily loss limit and the drawdown figure are the broker's numbers, not your memory of them.

For each symbol you plan to trade, write the analysis, the entry conditions, what must happen for a setup to be valid, and what invalidates it. Emphasise clarity: "If price does X, I'm interested. If it does Y, I'm out."

The goal is to remove decision-making from the heat of the moment. Your analysis should be specific enough that someone else could execute your trades from what you wrote. Key levels get exact prices. Invalidation is defined before entry, never after.

Need help shaping a setup? Open Brainstorm with Edge inside the Strategy form. It suggests names, criteria and invalidation rules inline, and you accept or reject each one row by row. Paste a chart screenshot into the journal for the record: a pasted image is offered to the entry you are writing.

Wait. Watch price. Only execute when your pre-defined conditions are met. If no setup appears, that is a successful day of discipline. Your job is not to trade; it is to wait for your edge.

Scalpers who rest limit and stop orders at their levels get a gift here. Every working order at the broker is mirrored on the Orders page (Trade Log, Orders mode). Open a resting order and write the pre-trade journal: the thesis, the level, the invalidation, a screenshot of the chart as it looks now. You are recording the decision before the outcome exists, which is the only time it is honest.

When a setup appears but does not quite meet your conditions, log it as a Forward Test trade instead of skipping it silently. The taken-vs-Forward-Test gap on the Forward Test page will tell you later whether the skip was discipline or hesitation.

Press P whenever your state changes. One to three sentences: what you see, what you feel, what you are about to do. Attach a screenshot if it helps. Pulses are your real-time emotional record, captured before you knew the outcome, which is gold for review. They are auto-attached to today's journal and can be linked to the trade they belong to.

The fill itself is not your job any more. A synced connection records entry, exit, size and fees as they happened, and a scaled exit is recorded as the partials it actually was. Those fields are locked on the trade, because a number that came from the broker is worth more than one you could edit.

If you trade from a platform that does not sync, log the trade the moment you are in: press T, and as you fill the form Edge Context shows your real edge for this session, symbol and hold time, with a warning when risk is unusually high for you.

When a synced trade lands, the post-sync review lists it with the broker's breakdown: where it went on, where it came off, how big it was. Press Journal trade and the edit form opens with the numbers already filled in. Your only work is the part sync cannot do: whether you followed your rules, which rules you broke, how you rate the execution, and what you would do differently.

The reflection is not about the outcome. It is about the process. A losing trade with perfect execution is a success. A winning trade with poor execution is a lesson. If words don't come, hit Reflect with Edge. It reads the trade, your strategy and your pulses, then drafts a reflection you can edit before saving. Use Ask Edge on any trade card to dig into a specific decision after the fact.

Repeat for every trade: Setup, Order, Pulses, Fill, Reflection. The process stays the same whether you are up or down. That consistency is what builds a reliable trading system over time.

Finish with one last sync, then reconcile. Every fill of the day should sit in the Trade Log with a reflection, every unfilled order should be cancelled or journalled, and the account balance should match your platform. If a trade is missing, it is in the held-back duplicates or on a platform that is not connected, and either way you find out today rather than at month end.

Then close the daily journal: execution quality, emotional control, key lessons. Compare the morning plan to what actually happened. Look for patterns in your pulses. Identify what you did well and what needs work. This is where learning happens, so don't rush it.

The logging streak rewards showing up, not perfection. A journal entry, a pulse, a logged trade (real or Forward Test) or a finished backtest session all count, and synced fills count as logged trades. If life gets in the way, earned freezes protect the streak so one missed day doesn't undo a month of discipline.

At the end of each week, review your Trade Log for patterns in execution, emotions and setup performance. Weekly Focus lands on your dashboard every Sunday with the one behavioural pattern Edge thinks matters most, and the Weekly Report email summarises last week's execution in writing. Read both before you look at P&L.

Then go deeper. Filter Insights by account to see whether the funded book is dragging your stats, and by tag to see whether your best setup is actually your best setup. Let the Exit Optimizer test stop and target distances against the fills you actually took. Because the fills came from the broker, every one of those numbers is trustworthy.

If a weakness keeps showing up, the Suggested Backtests lab proposes replay sessions to drill it. One click and you are in a focused Backtester session. On the desktop app the replay runs on real ticks, so when one bar held both your stop and your target, the tick decides, not a guess.