Sunday Market Breakdown: weekly routine for swing traders

Starting Monday morning without preparation is like walking into a meeting without reading the agenda. You react instead of plan. And reactive traders lose.

The Sunday Market Breakdown is a weekly routine, usually 30 to 60 minutes on Sunday evening, where you prepare for the week ahead. Not to predict what the market will do, but to decide how you will respond. Especially as a swing trader, where positions stay open for days or weeks, that preparation is the difference between a thoughtful entry and an impulsive click.

What goes into a good SMB as a swing trader?

1. Higher Timeframe. Start on D1 and W1 to map structure, trend and range. Then drop down to H4 for timing and possible entry zones. As a swing trader this is your base; anything lower than H4 rarely adds anything to your weekly plan.
2. Set your bias. Per instrument: long, short or wait-and-see. Written down, not in your head. Anyone who didn't write a bias and afterwards says "I knew it" is lying to themselves. A swing bias usually holds for the whole week, unless a key level breaks.
3. Key levels + alerts. Mark 2 to 4 levels per instrument where you expect a reaction, and set alerts on them. As a swing trader this is critical: you don't need to sit in front of the screen, the alert comes to you. No alert means missed setups or, worse, reacting too late to invalidation.
4. Review the news. What macro events are on the calendar this week? CPI, FOMC, NFP, central bank speeches. Extra important for swing traders: your position stays open for days and can be hit by a single event. Decide in advance whether you'll sit through an event or close before the release.
5. Trade plan scenarios. For each key level: "If price comes to X, then I do Y. Invalidation is at Z." Concrete, with direction, entry, stop and first target. No scenario = no trade.

Why does it work?

Three reasons.

First: it lowers cognitive load during the week. During market hours you're in a state of heightened pressure. Decisions made during market hours are demonstrably worse than the ones you make calmly on a Sunday. By making your most important decisions in advance, all you need to do during the week is execute.

Second: it makes discipline measurable. At the end of the week you can review: were the trades I took scenarios I had foreseen on Sunday? How often did I take a trade that wasn't in my SMB? That's your discipline leak made visible.

Third: it makes patterns visible over months. Once you have 12 weeks of SMBs, you can look back and see: which biases were correct? Which setups kept repeating? Where were you consistently wrong? That's gold.

How do you start?

Keep it simple. Begin with a template of one page max per week:

• 3 instruments (no more, at the beginning)
• Per instrument: HTF context (1 sentence), bias, key levels with alerts (max 3), scenario (1–2 sentences)
• Top 3 events of the week
• One line: "this week I avoid...", e.g. trades through FOMC, entering too early before a level is tested, etc.

Do it 4 weeks in a row. You'll notice after the second week that you're calmer and more selective, and that you take trades because they're in your plan, not because your screen is flashing red or green.

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Create Impacts has a built-in Sunday Market Breakdown system with streaks, templates and a link to your trades so you can see afterwards which SMBs led to your best performance. Start free.