The Sunday review: how one trader runs her week in 45 minutes

Sarah is a senior product manager in Rotterdam. She has a husband, two kids under eight, a fixed-rate mortgage that re-fixes next year, and a €52,000 IBKR account she’s grown from €15,000 over five years. She trades European and US large-caps on a 3-to-14-day horizon, sells covered calls on her larger positions, and buys protective puts ahead of macro events she’s flagged as risky.

She has one trading window a week. Sunday morning. Coffee. No phone. Charts and a plan.

For two years she ran that Sunday morning out of a Notion log she updated by hand and a TradingView free tier she’d refresh manually for each watchlist symbol. The review took close to two hours, most of which was reconciliation — manually entering Friday’s closing prices, computing R-multiples in Excel, screenshotting setups into Notion, hunting through her broker for which positions she’d opened or closed that week.

The actual decision-making — what’s still working, what’s broken, what do I do at Monday’s open — got the last twenty minutes.

This post is the workflow she runs now. It takes 45 minutes total, and the decision-making gets thirty of those.

Minute 0 to 5 — The regime read

She opens Mantis. The first thing on the dashboard is the Macro Regime gauge. A number between 0 and 100. Above 70 the macro tape is risk-on. Below 30 it’s risk-off. Between, it’s mixed.

Last week the score was 64. This week it’s 71. She taps the gauge and the radar opens — VIX has eased, the yield curve steepened modestly, credit spreads are quiet. Three of the six components are clearly bullish, two neutral, one mildly defensive. Regime is risk-on but not euphoric.

This is the lens she’ll read every other screen through. In a risk-on regime, breakout setups have a tailwind and her conservative sizing rules can relax. In a risk-off regime, she’d be smaller, more selective, and her hedges would already be on. Five minutes in, she knows which version of herself she’s trading this week.

Minute 5 to 15 — Positions and risk

Risk Manager next. Her open book is six positions: three European equities, two US equities, one covered call against an existing ASML position. Capital at Risk reads €1,840 — about 3.5% of the account. Well within her rule of never having more than 5% at risk across the book.

But one row has a flag. Her ASML position is now 28% of her exposure — it’s appreciated since she bought it and the concentration alert has fired. She knows she could either trim it or accept the concentration. She’d rather sell another covered call against it and let the position keep working while she generates premium income on it. She notes the decision for Monday.

The other six positions read clean. Stops in place, R-multiples target between 1.5 and 2.2, no orphaned exits. The Risk Manager is the one screen she actually trusts more than her own spreadsheet — and that’s the screen she used to spend ninety minutes building.

Minute 15 to 25 — The week behind

She opens the Trade Journal. Last week she opened two positions and closed one. The closed one was a Shopify swing she’d held nine days for €420 of profit. Her notes from entry read: ‘breakout from 21 EMA basing, sector rotating in, IV reasonable.’ Her notes from exit read: ‘thesis played out, into resistance, scaling out 80%, holding remainder.’

Useful trade. Clean execution. She moves on.

She opens Pattern Analytics. Win rate by setup tag tells her her ‘21 EMA pullback’ setups are running at 64% over the last 30 trades. Her ‘breakout’ setups are at 41%. Win rate by day of the week shows her Monday and Tuesday trades are running 11 percentage points better than her Thursday and Friday trades. She makes a mental note: avoid initiating new positions late in the week unless conviction is unusually high. She’s seen this signal three weeks in a row now. It’s no longer a coincidence.

The Trade Journal used to be the screen she avoided because it was where the spreadsheet shame lived. Now it’s the screen where the patterns she actually cares about are already computed. That’s the difference between a journal that records and a journal that teaches.

Minute 25 to 40 — The week ahead

Smart Money is next. Five symbols where conviction money moved on Friday. NVDA · $48M in calls · 2× open interest · bullish. AMD · $14M in calls · 1.8× open interest · bullish. Two others are bearish puts on names she doesn’t follow. One is a roll on a position she doesn’t have a view on.

NVDA she already holds. AMD she doesn’t, but the conviction signal aligns with a technical setup she’d been watching — pullback to the 21 EMA, sector rotation continuing. She taps through to the AMD chain, sees that the bullish flow was concentrated in the June 175 calls, and adds AMD to her watchlist with a tagged setup: ‘21 EMA pullback, smart money agrees.’

Whale Tracker is a quarterly check, not a weekly one — she’ll open it in early August. But Earnings AI matters this week: two of her positions report Wednesday. She opens both and reads the previous-quarter transcript summary so she remembers what the CFO sounded like last time. Two minutes per name. Now she knows what to listen for in the actual call.

Minute 40 to 45 — Tomorrow’s plan

She writes the plan in the Trade Journal as a list of intents:

1. Sell a covered call against ASML, June expiry, strike about 8% out-of-the-money.
2. Watch AMD for the 21 EMA pullback; if it hits, take a starter position with a stop just below the EMA.
3. Two earnings names report Wednesday — pre-trade rules in place: no adds before earnings, take notes during the call, decide on holds vs. trims Thursday morning.
4. Nothing else this week. If something dramatic happens to the regime, reassess Wednesday.

That’s it. Sunday morning is over. She closes the laptop and her partner brings the kids back from football.

What the workflow actually changed

The first two years, Sarah was a competent trader running on a Notion log and Excel. She made money. She also spent eight hours a week on the operational side — reconciling, updating, building reports. Most of that work was the same work she’d done the previous week.

The Mantis workflow gives her her Sunday morning back. Not because the app does anything she couldn’t theoretically do herself — she could absolutely build her own regime score, manually parse 13F filings, and write her own pattern analytics in Python. She doesn’t, because she has two kids and a job. What she pays for is the eight hours a week the workflow returns to her, with the data already correct.

The trades that come out of a forty-five-minute Sunday morning are not better than the trades that came out of a two-hour Sunday morning. They are, however, the same quality. And the next seven and a half hours go back to her family.

What this workflow assumes

This is a swing trader’s workflow. If you’re trading intraday, the Sunday review still happens, but the actual battleground is the pre-market scan and the live tape. Different workflow, different post — coming soon.

It also assumes you’re in Mantis with at least the Essential tier — the Macro Regime gauge and the screener live there. Smart Money is Pro. The Trade Journal and Risk Manager work on every tier including the free one. Most weekend traders get most of the value from Essential at €14.99 a month, which is roughly what one bad impulsive trade costs once a quarter.

Sarah is on Pro. She uses Smart Money every week. The €40 a month is the cheapest line item in her trading budget.

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