Building your equities-only workflow

Six steps that turn the whole market into 3-5 trades

You can't trade ten thousand stocks. You can barely trade ten. The job of a good workflow is to take the universe of available names and compress it, every single morning, into a watchlist of 3-5 candidates with a written plan attached to each. This lesson closes chapter six by stitching everything you've learned into a process you can actually run. The pieces — gaps, earnings, opening range, VWAP, time-of-day, sizing — only produce edge when they sit inside a repeatable workflow.

Step one: scan. Overnight and pre-market, run a market scanner. You're looking for catalysts. Stocks that reported earnings after yesterday's close. Stocks gapping more than 2% in pre-market. Sector ETFs leading or lagging by more than 1%. Major news headlines on individual names. Most retail platforms ship with built-in scanners that handle this in two clicks. The output of step one is a long list — usually 30-100 names — that you'll narrow in the next steps.

Step two: relative-strength filter. Compare each name's pre-market or overnight move to the broader market (SPY). Buy candidates need to be stronger than SPY. Short candidates need to be weaker. This single filter cuts the list roughly in half and pushes you toward names where institutional flow is already supporting your direction. Step three: setup screen. Apply your specific setup criteria. If you trade ORBs, mark the opening range and tag candidates with clean ranges. If you trade gap fades, look for gaps in the 1.5-4% range on average volume with no major catalyst. If you trade post-earnings drift, look for beat-and-raise reports with strong pre-market follow-through.

Step four: build the watchlist. From the filtered list, pick 3-5 names you will actually trade today. Not 30. The cap matters — more than five names produces decision fatigue and you end up trading the wrong setup on the wrong stock at the wrong time. Step five: write a one-line plan for each. Format: 'TICKER — entry trigger / stop level / first target / size.' Example: 'AAPL — long ORB above $192.50, stop $190.80, target $195.50, 3 shares.' That's it. One line. Step six: execute the plan. Take the trade only if the trigger is met. Don't take it if it isn't. Track the outcome — win/loss, R-multiple, whether you followed your own plan. Over weeks, the data tells you which setups, which filters, and which market regimes are paying you. Adjust from there.

Recap: scan, filter for relative strength, screen for setup, build a 3-5-name watchlist, write a one-line plan, execute. Run it every day. The edge compounds in the consistency of the process, not in any single trade. That closes chapter six and track four.