The Go-Live Checklist

Going Live Is a Decision, Not a Feeling

"I think I'm ready" is not a standard. It's a mood, and moods are exactly what got most traders into trouble in the first place. Going live with real money — or moving from a demo/evaluation account to a funded one — should be a pass/fail decision against a written checklist, the same way every other part of your strategy is rule-based rather than felt.

This lesson gives you that checklist. Treat it as a gate: if you can't check every box honestly, you're not ready yet, and that's useful information, not a failure.

1. The Strategy Is Fully Written Down

You can produce, without hesitation, the five-part definition from Lesson 1: context, trigger, entry, exit, management. If you have to think hard about any part of it, it isn't internalized yet.

2. It's Been Backtested Without Hindsight Bias

You've completed a backtest using bar-by-bar replay or disciplined pattern scanning (Lesson 2), logging every occurrence — including the ones that didn't trigger a full setup or that failed. Not just the wins you remember.

3. It's Been Forward Tested on Sim or Minimum Size

You have real-time occurrences, not just historical ones, where you didn't know the outcome in advance. This is non-negotiable — a backtest alone, no matter how clean, has not been proven against your own execution under uncertainty.

4. Your Sample Size Is Large Enough to Trust

You have at minimum 30 combined backtest + forward-test occurrences, ideally 50-100, spanning more than one type of market condition (Lesson 3). If your setup is rare and you're still under 30 occurrences, the honest answer is: not yet, keep collecting data.

5. Expectancy Is Positive and You Know the Number

You can state your expectancy in R, computed from your actual journal data (Lesson 4), not estimated from memory. If it's negative or you don't know it, you don't have a case for trading this live.

6. You Know Your Worst Realistic Losing Streak

Based on your win rate, you've estimated the probability and length of a realistic losing streak, and you've confirmed your position sizing and account can survive it without breaching a max drawdown rule or a prop firm's daily/overall loss limit. // VERIFY BEFORE LAUNCH: prop firm drawdown rules change frequently — confirm current limits with your specific firm before sizing.

7. Your Risk Per Trade Is Fixed and Instrument-Correct

You have a specific dollar risk per trade and know exactly how many contracts that translates to for the instrument you're trading, using the correct tick value (e.g., NQ at $20/point, MNQ at $2/point, ES at $50/point, MES at $5/point). This calculation should be automatic, not something you work out under pressure mid-trade.

8. You Have a Written Daily/Weekly Loss Limit

A hard stop for the day and the week, written down before you start, not decided in the moment when you're already down and emotional.

9. Your Journal Template Is Ready and You'll Use It From Trade One

The structured fields from Lesson 4 are set up before you take a single live trade — not something you'll "start doing once things get going." Trade one on the live account is exactly as important a data point as trade one hundred.

10. You Can Say What Would Make You Stop Trading This Strategy

Before going live, define your kill criteria: what result, over what number of trades, would tell you the strategy stopped working or was never as good as the backtest suggested? Without this written down in advance, you'll rationalize every losing streak as "still within normal variance" indefinitely, and never actually retire a broken approach.

Using the Checklist Honestly

The value of this checklist comes entirely from applying it honestly. It's tempting to round a "sort of tested" into a checkmark because you're eager to start. Resist that. Every box you check without really having done the work just moves the real test from a controlled evaluation to your live account — where the cost of finding out isn't a wasted afternoon, it's real money.

If you fail several boxes right now, that's not a setback — it's the checklist doing its job. Go back to Lessons 1 through 4, do the work those boxes require, and come back to this list when you can check it off for real.