Restarting the Routine After Two Weeks Away

Start with the log rather than the chart. Two weeks away leaves a set of rules that are still written down and no longer loaded, and the gap between those two states is where the first session back goes wrong. The rebuild list sitting on orb trading routine richiebranson is ordered deliberately, reading before watching and watching before trading, because a routine comes back in that order or it does not come back at all. Nothing about the opening range changed while you were gone. What changed is the operator.

Read Your Own Last Twenty Entries

The trade journal is the fastest way back in, and it has to be read before any new opinion forms. Twenty entries is enough to recover what the rules actually were, as opposed to what they feel like they were. Memory of a strategy drifts toward the trades that ended well, so a fortnight of distance quietly promotes the exceptions into rules.

Watch Before Trading

One full session watched without a position is not a wasted morning. The instrument may have changed character while you were away, with a wider average range, thinner volume, or a gap regime that was not there before. Watching a single open answers that faster than reading about it.

The specific thing being restored is timing. Knowing how long the first fifteen minutes actually feels, how fast the tape moves at the cash open, and how much a normal retest wobbles before it resolves. None of that is verbal knowledge and none of it survives two weeks intact.

Half Size for a Fixed Count

Come back at half the normal position size for a stated number of sessions, five being a reasonable number, and step up only after that count is complete regardless of how the five went. Tying the step up to results instead of to a count means a good first day promotes you and a bad one demotes you, which converts a restart into a performance review.

Check What Broke While You Were Gone

Platform updates install themselves, alerts expire, a watchlist rolls over, and a futures contract may have gone through a rollover that moved every level you drew. Two weeks is long enough for all of that. Half an hour spent on the mechanics before the first session back is cheaper than discovering a stale chart with a live order working.

The First Week Is for Following, Not Improving

Time away produces ideas. Almost all of them arrive without any supporting sample size, because nothing was traded while they formed. Writing them down and running the old rules unchanged for a week costs almost nothing and keeps the record continuous, which is the only way to tell later whether the break itself mattered.

A routine restarted properly is boring for about five sessions. That is the correct feeling, and traders who skip the boring part usually pay for it inside the first hour of the first day back.