Futures · Managing futures risk · lesson 9 of 9 · 6 min read · David Alexander
The futures risk plan on one page
the futures risk plan
The one-page document for the asset class with permanent teeth: the budget and the two-number size, the session-honest stop, the headroom floor in days, the nightly and event policies, the board-collapsed heat ledger, and the ladder's thresholds written where they can be seen. The equity plan replaced missing mechanisms; this one stands between the trader and mechanisms that never blink.
Fifth risk plan, same page length, opposite problem to the last one: equities had no teeth, and futures are nothing else. The plan's lines follow.
The futures risk plan
- Risk per trade: fixed fraction, in money - unchanged through five asset classes, and the anchor for everything below.
- Size: the division's two numbers - computed and floored - with the refused fraction recorded and the variant decision (micro or flagship) made by the arithmetic - lessons 1 and 2.
- Stop: session-separated range, grid-aware placement, in points and in money - lesson 3.
- The headroom floor: days of ordinary adversity, the second gate, checked at every entry - lesson 4; the plan names the floor and the plausible-flow method.
- The nightly policy: hold, reduce or flatten - per book, per night, Fridays their own clause - lesson 5.
- The event policy: flat through the minutes by default, gap-sized holds only at the division's answer - lesson 6.
- The heat ledger: months collapsed, tethers followed, budgets per cluster - lesson 7.
- The ladder's numbers, written down: call thresholds, liquidation mechanics, and each family's limit rules from the spec - lesson 8; not because they will be met, but because written thresholds are the difference between machinery and ambush.
What is deliberately absent, fifth telling
No views, no targets, no conviction scale. The plan works identically whether the ideas are brilliant or wrong - the sentence has now survived five asset classes, and the futures version adds only its local corollary: here the machinery grades the plan nightly, in cash, whether or not anyone reads the grade.
The closing frame
The futures plan is the platform's most mechanical because the asset class is: every threshold external, every flow scheduled, every failure mode published in advance. Which yields the track's risk lesson in one line - in a market where everything is arithmetic, all risk failures are arithmetic left undone - and hands module 5 an account that can survive its own analysis being wrong, which is the only kind worth analysing for.
Check your understanding
Question 1 of 2
What is the futures plan's own contribution to the platform's risk machinery?