Warm-up steps

The warm-up is the pre-session ritual that gates the trading UI — until it's complete, the live screens stay locked. It's a library of steps you choose from, configured in Settings → Warm Up. This page explains what each step does and the psychology behind it, so you can build a warm-up that actually shifts your state rather than one you click through.

You don't need all of them. A good warm-up is short enough to do every day and deliberate enough to create a cold-start — so you can't see-it-take-it in the first thirty seconds of the session. That friction is the entire point.

Opening

Welcome Slide

The opening screen. It sets the tone, shows the date, and can carry your streak or a quote. Mechanically it does little — but rituals need a threshold, a "we're starting now" moment that separates the rest of your day from the session.

Marking a clear beginning is what psychologists call an entry cue: a consistent signal that tells your brain to switch modes. The same reason athletes have a pre-game routine — the cue, repeated daily, does half the work of getting into state.

Reading your state

Emotional Check-In

A few quick questions — feeling, confidence, sleep — answered on a simple scale before you trade. The answers are stored so the cool-down can show you the before/after.

Naming a feeling reduces its grip. Affect labelling — putting emotion into words — measurably lowers amygdala activity. You're not journaling for its own sake; you're taking the charge out of whatever you walked in carrying so it doesn't leak into your first trade.

State Check-In

A two-axis read of your state: valence (how good/bad you feel) against arousal (how activated you are). One tap places you on the grid. It's the science-backed core of Kaxse's readiness signal.

This is the circumplex model of affect — most trading-relevant states aren't "good" or "bad" but a combination. High-arousal-negative (anxious, angry) is where revenge trades live; low-arousal-negative (flat, tired) is where you miss setups. Knowing which corner you're in tells you which mistake you're prone to today.

Mindset Check-In

An adaptive, CBT-style reflection that only appears when Kaxse detects a behavioural pattern in your recent trades — revenge trading, FOMO, position drift. On clean stretches it's skipped entirely.

This is cognitive-behavioural therapy's core move: catch the distorted thought before it drives the behaviour. By surfacing a targeted prompt the morning after a pattern shows up — instead of a generic question every day — it stays sharp and you don't tune it out.

Fuel & Lifestyle Check

A quick read on the physical foundations — fuel, hydration, alcohol, sleep. It can cap your readiness when they slip, but never boosts it (opt-in).

Self-control is metabolically expensive, and discipline degrades first when you're under-slept, hungry, or hungover. Surfacing the foundations makes the invisible visible: most "tilt" is just a depleted brain making worse decisions, and you trade smaller when you can see that's the case.

Non-Negotiables

A short checklist of personal commitments you hold yourself to before trading — responsibilities handled, urgent work finished, clear headspace. An unmet item can optionally cap your readiness.

This is implementation intention applied to your life outside the screen. Trading from a cluttered, guilty, or distracted mind imports that noise into every decision. The list is a gate: clear the deck first, so the session has your full attention instead of your leftover attention.

Committing to the session

Acknowledgement

A typed confirmation that you accept responsibility for today's trades and will follow your rules. You type the phrase rather than tapping a button.

Typing is a costly signal — it takes effort, which makes the commitment feel real in a way a checkbox never does. Writing "I accept responsibility" in your own hand recruits ownership: it's much harder to blame the market for a trade you explicitly signed for thirty seconds ago.

Walk-Away Plan

Pre-commit, while calm, exactly when and how you'll stop — at the daily loss limit, after three losses in a row, when you feel the urge to win it back — and commit to each.

The whole premise of Kaxse: the calm version of you and the heated version are different decision-makers. Deciding your exit conditions now, before any money is on the line, means the in-session you only has to execute a decision, not make one. Pre-commitment beats willpower because willpower is exactly what's gone when you need it.

Pre-Trade Checklist

Physical and mental readiness items that all must be checked — market open and liquid, playbook reviewed, news calendar checked, risk set. Optionally, an unchecked item can lock you out.

Checklists exist because experts skip steps under pressure, not from ignorance — the surgeon and the pilot both use them for this reason. A pre-trade checklist catches the "I forgot to check the calendar" mistakes that have nothing to do with skill and everything to do with rushing.

Your rules & plan

Risk Rules Reminder

Surfaces your liquidation and warning rules — the guardrails you set in Risk Rules — so they're fresh before the first entry.

You can't follow a rule you've forgotten. Re-reading the limits at the moment they matter keeps them available in working memory, so when a setup tempts you past them, the rule is already in mind to push back.

Write Down Your Rules

Type your rules out from memory — a short timed block — rather than just reading them.

Active recall beats passive review for retention by a wide margin: producing the rule yourself encodes it far more strongly than seeing it does. Rules you've hand-written this morning are the ones that surface, unprompted, mid-session.

Guidelines & Reminders

A scrollable set of your own personalised trading guidelines — "only A+ setups", "one loss = pause ten minutes", "scale out at 1R".

These are your hard-won lessons in your own words. Re-reading them daily is spaced repetition for discipline: the principles stay top-of-mind instead of being something you rediscover painfully every few weeks.

Settling the nervous system

Inspiration Slide

A curated board — quotes, images, video, or live reads — that sets the mindset you want to trade from.

Priming is real: what you attend to just before a task shapes how you approach it. Choosing what fills your head in the last minute before the session — your process, your identity as a disciplined trader — crowds out the noise you'd otherwise carry in.

Don't Do This

The inverse board — a record of your worst trading behaviours, in your own words, so the cost is vivid before you risk repeating it.

Loss aversion makes a remembered mistake a stronger motivator than an imagined gain. Confronting "you revenge-traded and blew the daily limit — never again" makes the consequence concrete, and concrete consequences are the ones that actually stop the hand.

Meditation Timer

A settling meditation — a breathing-glow animation, optional chimes, and a before/after read of how calm you are.

A few minutes of focused attention down-regulates the sympathetic "fight or flight" response that turns a normal drawdown into a panic. The before/after read makes the shift visible, which both confirms it worked and trains you to recognise the calm state you're aiming for.

Breathing Exercise

A guided breathing protocol — box breathing by default — to bring you into calm focus, with the pattern optionally suggested from your current state.

Slow, paced breathing is the fastest physiological lever you have on your own arousal: it raises heart-rate variability and shifts you toward the parasympathetic state where judgement is clearest. Unlike "just calm down", it's a mechanical action that works on the body directly, in about ninety seconds.

Reading the market & yesterday

Yesterday Review

A look back at your last session — P&L, rule breaks, grades, and your own notes (an AI coach note is optional).

Closing the loop on yesterday stops it bleeding into today. Reviewing process (did I follow my rules?) rather than just outcome keeps a green day from breeding overconfidence and a red day from breeding revenge — both of which inflate the next position.

Today's Market Events

A pre-session market read — whether the market's open and the day's top headlines (live once market enrichment is connected).

Context sets expectations. Knowing a major release is due, or that conditions are thin, lets you size and plan before the candle surprises you — replacing in-the-moment reaction with prepared response.

Timer

A timed focus block — chart review, planning, journalling — that you can add more than once. A countdown with a prompt and an end chime.

A box around a task fights the two failure modes of prep: rushing it (no real review) and sprawling into it (analysis paralysis). A fixed window forces deliberate, bounded attention — enough to do the work, not enough to spiral.

Trading Simulator

A short MNQ replay drill — place an entry, stop, and target, then watch the candles play forward to reveal the result. It inherits your Simulator settings.

Reps without risk warm up pattern recognition and decision-making the way a batting cage warms up a swing. You arrive at the live session already "in the motion", so your first real decision isn't also your first decision of the day.

Launch

Session Launch

The closing screen — a final message, today's readiness, and the buttons that take you into the live session (or let you stand down with a no-trade day).

The warm-up should end on intent, not just "done". Restating that you're ready and choosing to start — or honestly choosing not to — turns the launch into a decision you own, which is the frame you want to carry into the first trade.