It is the first week of January. The markets are open. The charts are moving. And I am sitting on my hands.
Why? Because the first week of the trading year is notoriously treacherous. Institutional desks are just getting back online, liquidity is often thin, and volatility can be erratic as big players rebalance portfolios. The moves you see right now are often “noise”—fake-outs that trap the eager retail traders rushing to hit their “New Year’s Resolutions.”
I don’t trade noise. I wait for the true trend to reveal itself, usually in Week 2. So, what do I do with this spare time? I don’t idle. I clean the cockpit.
A cluttered environment leads to a cluttered mind. (For thoughts on uncluttering the mind see my post – The Off-Switch: Why I Trade Better After 80 Feet of Water. You cannot make split-second decisions about risk if you are fighting through layers of digital trash. Here is my annual Digital Reset Routine to prepare for the trading year.
1. The Indicator Purge (TradingView)
Over the last year, my strategy has evolved. That is necessary; if you aren’t adapting, you are dying. But this evolution leaves a trail of debris. I opened my TradingView indicator list this morning and found four different versions of my custom volatility script:
Vol_Script_v1Vol_Script_TESTVol_Script_FINALVol_Script_FINAL_REAL
Does this look familiar? When you have multiple versions of the truth, you hesitate. Which one was I supposed to use again? The last thing I need is added mental clutter. The Fix: I deleted everything except the current, working version. If I haven’t used an indicator in 3 months, it is gone. And there were a lot. One simple example – many traders (myself included) have an indicator on their chart that defines a range. It moves with price, sometimes they get wider, sometimes narrower. It helps to see when price movement is just noise, and when something is really happening.
Early on I landed on Keltner Channels. I had versions with offset bands, so I could be alerted when price was close to the outside. I had a strategy version that triggered an order based on the price exiting and re-entering the channel. I had versions more and less sensitive to changes in volatility. Then I have a stack of Bollinger Band based custom indicators. And so on, and so on. I don’t use any of them anymore. So why are they there, like a stack of old newspapers? I do have a tendency to be a bit of a digital hoarder – those “inbox zero” people really mystify me – but there is not need for the “My scripts” section of TradingView to look like the table of contents to War and Peace, but for trading – long, ambitious, and far more than anyone needs to read to understand the ending.
I also nuked my Watchlists. That “Crypto Moonshots 2024” list? It’s history. Delete it. I primarily trade one pair, with three more active for when the primary is flat. The rest are just dangerous distractions.
2. Distilling the Gold (The Boox)
My Boox tablet is where I do my thinking. It is filled with PDFs of charts that I marked up over the past few months – patterns I spotted, mistakes I made, and setups I missed. Before the Boox I had stacks of Moleskine notebooks. And I have a folder on my hard drive full of annotated screenshots. I take a screen shot, paste it into Paint.net, and comment it up with all my observations. Most people hoard this sort of note. They think, “I might need this someday.” You won’t. You will never scroll back to a random Tuesday in last March.
The Fix: I am currently reading through every single annotated chart from last year.
- If it’s noise: I delete the file immediately.
- If it’s Gold: If I find a specific reminder (e.g., “You entered too early on the retest here”), I copy that specific insight into my “2026 Playbook.” Then I delete the file.
I don’t want a library of thousands of charts. I want a single page of high-impact lessons.
3. Taming the Slot Machine (X/Twitter)
If anything is begging for a digital reset, it is your social media. Yes, social media can be useful, but X (formerly Twitter) is designed to be a dopamine slot machine. If your feed is a mix of serious macro analysis, memes, political rage-bait, and influencers shilling coins, you are poisoning your information supply. You cannot find “Alpha” in a feed that is triggering your fight-or-flight response.
The Fix:
- Unfollow Mercilessly: If an account didn’t make me money or teach me something in 2025, they are gone.
- The Focus Feed: I created a private List called “Focus Feed.” It has only 15 accounts—trusted analysts and news aggregators. When I am working, I only look at that List. I never look at the “For You” algorithmic feed. The algorithm wants engagement; I want clarity. This is important – the “For You” feed has one purpose, and one purpose only: to keep you scrolling. Especially for the neurodivergent, this can be absolutely deadly.
The Clean Slate
When I sit down to trade next week, my workspace will be silent.
- My chart will have only the tools I use.
- My tablet will have only the lessons that matter.
- My news feed will have only the signal.
Trading is stressful enough without fighting your own tools. Clear the deck. The market will be waiting for you on Monday.
