The ten-minute daily routine

Five modules of tools are useless if looking at them takes an hour you do not have. This lesson compresses everything into a routine that fits in ten minutes before the open, produces a one-sentence regime call, and leaves you free to trade your setups. The point of the routine is not to find trades. It is to decide what kind of day and week you are trading into.

The one-page layout

Build a single screen or a single page (a charting platform layout, a spreadsheet, or a printed template) with four blocks. Fill it in the same order every day.

┌─────────────────────────────┬─────────────────────────────┐
│ A. DAILY BREADTH (3 min)    │ B. VOLATILITY (2 min)       │
│ index vs 50/200-day         │ VIX level, 5-day change     │
│ EW/CW ratio, 20-day trend   │ VIX / VIX3M                 │
│ % above 50-day, 200-day     │ VVIX                        │
│ net new highs (5-day avg)   │ equity P/C, 10-day avg      │
│ McClellan osc + summation   │ any expiration this week?   │
├─────────────────────────────┼─────────────────────────────┤
│ C. INTERMARKET (3 min)      │ D. YESTERDAY'S TAPE (2 min) │
│ 10y yield, 20-day change bp │ day type: trend/chop/rev    │
│ stock-bond corr sign        │ ADD close, UVOL/DVOL close  │
│ 2s10s slope, monthly move   │ TRIN close                  │
│ dollar, oil, gold (monthly) │ TICK extremes seen          │
│ HY OAS, 20-day change       │ range as % of 20-day ATR    │
│ discretionary/staples ratio │                             │
└─────────────────────────────┴─────────────────────────────┘
          ▼
   REGIME SENTENCE (one line, written down)

Block D is filled in after the close rather than before the open; the morning version is simply a re-read.

The routine, minute by minute

Minutes 0-3: daily breadth. Look at the index and the equal-weight ratio together. Then the two percent-above lines and net new highs. Then the McClellan pair. You are answering one question: is participation confirming price, narrowing, or washed out? Pick one word: broad, narrowing, split, washed-out.

Minutes 3-5: volatility. Level and term structure first. Then VVIX and the smoothed put/call. Then check the calendar for an expiration or VIX settlement. One phrase: "VIX 15, contango, hedges cheap" or "VIX 27, backwardation, crowd hedged".

Minutes 5-8: intermarket. Yields and their 20-day change, and the sign of the stock-bond correlation so you know how to read them. Then credit. Then a glance at dollar, oil, gold and one offence/defence ratio. One phrase: "rates background, credit calm, dollar soft, cyclicals leading" or whatever is true.

Minutes 8-10: yesterday and the sentence. Re-read yesterday's day type. Then write the regime sentence.

The regime sentence

The sentence has a fixed shape so that it is quick to write and easy to compare across days:

[Direction], [breadth word], [volatility phrase], [intermarket phrase], [yesterday's day type]. → [what that means for today's setups].

Examples:

"Daily uptrend, broad, VIX 14 in contango, rates and credit background, yesterday chop. → Long breakouts and pullbacks have the wind; intraday, wait for day type by 10:45."
"Daily uptrend, narrowing for 4 weeks, VIX 17 and VVIX rising, HY wider 60 bp on the month, yesterday reversal day. → Reduce size on new longs outside leaders; favour fading intraday extremes until ADD proves a trend."
"Daily downtrend, washed out (% above 50-day 14%), VIX 31 backwardation, HY stopped widening, yesterday trend-down with TRIN 2.8. → Stop pressing shorts; prepare long setups; need price confirmation."

The arrow is the part that matters. It translates description into a constraint on today's behaviour.

Key idea: The routine exists to produce one written sentence that constrains today's trading. Ten minutes, same order every day, same shape of sentence. Everything else is reading for interest.

What the routine does not include

Any intraday internal before the open. TICK, ADD, VOLD and TRIN are read live, from 9:45 onward, using the Module 2 fingerprint. The morning routine sets expectations; the live read confirms or overrides them.
News. Scheduled events (central bank meetings, major data releases) go on the calendar so you know a volatility event is due. Unscheduled news is handled live.
Stock selection. That is the job of your playbook. The routine tells the playbook how much wind it has.
Predictions. Nothing in the sentence says what the market will do. It says what it is doing.

Keeping it to ten minutes

The most common failure is scope creep: adding a series each week until the routine takes forty minutes and gets skipped. Rules that keep it lean:

One series per question. If two series answer the same question (McClellan oscillator and % above 20-day, say), keep the one you read faster.
Weekly, not daily, for slow series. The 200-day percent, the yield-curve slope, sector rotation and long-run correlations change slowly. Read them on Sunday, note them once, and only re-check during the week if something breaks.
Thresholds pre-marked. Put your calibrated percentile lines on each chart so that "extreme" is a glance, not a calculation.
The sentence is mandatory; the reading is optional. On a rushed morning, write the sentence from the last one and yesterday's tape, and move on. A slightly stale sentence beats no sentence.

The evening addendum

After the close, spend three minutes filling block D: day type, closing ADD and volume ratio, TRIN, TICK extremes and range. Then one line: did the day match the morning sentence? Yes, no, or partly. That one line, accumulated over months, is the feedback loop that makes your regime calls better. The next lesson is about where each series comes from; the one after it is about how to log all this so it is useful in six months.

Try it: Build the four-block page today, with whatever series you already have access to. Run the routine tomorrow morning and time it. If it took more than fifteen minutes, remove series until it fits. Write your first regime sentence and keep it; in Lesson 4 of this module you will compare it to a worked week.

Recap

Four blocks: daily breadth, volatility, intermarket, yesterday's tape; same order, ten minutes.
Each block reduces to one word or phrase; the four combine into a fixed-shape regime sentence with an arrow to today's constraints.
Intraday internals are read live from 9:45, not in the morning routine.
Keep it lean: one series per question, slow series weekly, thresholds pre-marked, the sentence mandatory even when the reading is skipped.
Three minutes after the close to log the day type and whether it matched the sentence.