The First Session of a New Quarter

Recalculate the position size and change nothing else. A quarter boundary moves one number, the account balance the risk percentage is applied to, and it moves it for arithmetic reasons rather than because the market has entered a new phase. The reason orb trading routine richiebranson marks these dates in the calendar at all is administrative: the sizing figure needs updating and the running record gets a label. A routine that treats the date as anything more than that starts the quarter by breaking things that were working.

The Arithmetic That Does Change

Risk per trade is a percentage of an account that is now a different number. Recompute the share size, or the contract count, from the new balance and the current stop distance, and write the result down. Doing this on a fixed date rather than continuously is deliberate, since resizing after every winning or losing session produces a size that is always chasing the last outcome.

The Label on the Sample

Results get a quarter marker so they can be read in blocks later. That is bookkeeping and it has no effect on the strategy. Expectancy and win rate are still measured on the cumulative sample size, never restarted, because a strategy that begins each quarter with a clean record can never accumulate enough trades to be judged.

The one useful comparison a quarter allows is against the same instrument's behaviour over the previous three months. Average opening range width drifts, and where it has halved, the stop distances and targets built on it are stale.

What Does Not Change

The rules, the instrument list, the timeframe, the daily loss limit. None of them have any relationship to the calendar. A quarter is not a market event, and treating it as one produces the specific failure of a rule change made for a reason that has nothing to do with the evidence.

Why the Date Attracts Changes

Because it feels like a natural place to start something, and because a bad previous quarter is still fresh. Those two together produce most of the rule changes made on the first Monday of January, April, July and October, and almost none of them survive to the end of the month. Any change genuinely justified was justified before the date arrived and can be introduced at a weekly reset like everything else.

The Session Itself

The first open of a quarter can be busy, and there are real flows around it that have nothing to do with the opening range. Volume at the cash open may be heavier than an ordinary Tuesday, spreads may behave differently in the first fifteen minutes, and a breakout may extend further than the recent record suggests. Treat that as a condition to note in the log, not as an edge. One session is one session, and a date on the calendar does not make it a bigger sample.