A decision tree application

A closure or a way out of the trading day.

May 20, 2025

Working with my performance coach Wesley Altman and finding my flaws and ways to reset I came up with a decision tree to help me to have a closure or a clue on how to proceed after trading while having bad or good emotions.

One such example is in days when you take 5 trades, but all losers, and you end up like a vacuum cleaner being disconnected from the power in the middle of the work. And you just want to suck more!

That is the time when you need to remind yourself that it is statistically possible to have a 14 trades losing streak even with 50% batting average,

How to overcome a losing streak

Peter Benci

July 4, 2023

Read full story

and not to choose to fight the market today and get emotional.

Another example is that you did quite well but took too many too risky trades or got too much emotionally attached to the trade. Watching every tick on the 1-minute chart, fearing of going against you. That is the time to question if you are still fine, or you will break into a hulk after one more because you took that random movement just because you liked it.

Spreadsheet

First it had a spreadsheet form. At the end after many iterations it looked like this.

It was hard to work with. But I had nothing better. over the time it took just too much space and looks scary that nobody would ever read it even if it is “cleaned” up to this form

The App

I made a small application that would speed up the process, and now I can force run it after every closed trade from my DAS.

Here it how it looks like.

I just copy the text from the result and attach it to my daily journal for the trade. The program also logs the answers to a text file so you can copy the whole day summary from the file.
Similar thing can be done for the after trading session to have a proper closure of the day. Sometimes I just feel that I did not do enough today so I can prepare the questions and the answers will lead me to a closure.

I made the app as an engine and the questions and answers can be customized with an external config file.

It is in JSON format so not the most natively readable thing, but there are good editors online that help you to show it as a tree as you edit them

{
  "question": "Was the trade result as expected?",
  "type": "yesno",
  "no": {
    "question": "Was it just the probability game?",
    "type": "yesno",
    "no": {
      "question": "Was it technical? No means Emotional.",
      "type": "yesno",
      "no": {
        "question": "Was I aware of the negative emo?",
        "type": "yesno",
        "yes": {
          "question": "Describe the emotion.",
          "type": "text",
          "next": {
            "question": "Take a deep breath. Can I regain control?",
            "type": "yesno",
            "yes": {
              "result": "CAN TAKE A HIGH QUALITY TRADE!"
            },
            "no": {
              "result": "MUST WALK AWAY!"
            }
          }
        },
        "no": {
          "result": "MUST WALK AWAY!"
        }
      },
      "yes": {
        "question": "Is it the usual mistake?",
        "type": "yesno",
        "yes": {
          "result": "Focus on this mistake not to make it again today. CAN TAKE A HIGH QUALITY TRADE!"
        },
        "no": {
          "question": "What happened?",
          "type": "text",
          "next": {
            "question": "Take a deep breath. Can I regain control?",
            "type": "yesno",
            "yes": {
              "result": "CAN TAKE A HIGH QUALITY TRADE!"
            },
            "no": {
              "result": "MUST WALK AWAY!"
            }
          }
        }
      }
    },
    "yes": {
      "result": "Awesome well done! CAN TAKE A HIGH QUALITY TRADE!"
    }
  },
  "yes": {
    "result": "Awesome well done! CAN TAKE A HIGH QUALITY TRADE!"
  }
}

can look like

in https://jsoneditoronline.org/

I am providing this app to any paying subscriber, just send me a private message and I will send it to you. I will most probably improve it over the time.

The app does only few things

yes/no questions
text input questions
green result when you can continue
red result when the result contains the word WALK (meaning WALK away)
you can select and copy the output as a text for further use

It can be extended to infinity so If you need just 2 questions for the closure like if you followed your plan or not, just edit the JSON file accordingly. It will just tell you to do whatever you write it to tell you. Walk away, call your trading buddy, or call your grandmother. It can be something encouraging that even that you failed you have a plan for tomorrow. You name it.

The details on how to run an external program from DAS Trader Pro I covered previously in several topics