Field note · 2 August 2026
A daily loss cap is a Sunday decision
The cap that ends your session has to be chosen before the open, in R or in won, when nobody is trying to get a morning back.
A daily loss cap is the point at which the plan says the session is over. It is not the moment you feel finished. Those two times rarely match, and the feeling usually arrives after an extra trade that was never in the plan.
We ask people to choose the cap on Sunday, or the evening before a session they care about. The number is written in R, or in won, on the same page as the setups. Monday morning is too late to invent it.
What the log usually shows
At the position desk we lay out twenty trades in a row. The pattern we see most often is not a mysterious entry. It is three losses inside the plan, then a fourth trade with a wider stop and a larger size, taken to repair the morning. That fourth trade is the week.
One visitor from Pohang had a written cap of 2R and a log that ignored it on four separate Mondays. He had not forgotten the number. He had written it as a hope at the bottom of the page, then decided in the moment that the day “did not count” because the first loss was a news spike. The cap only works if the plan says what counts. We rewrote his line: any closed loss counts, including the spike, and at minus 2R the session is finished even if a setup appears at 14:00.
Choose a number you can keep tomorrow
The useful cap is not the largest loss you can imagine surviving. It is the loss you can take and still follow the same plan the next morning. For some accounts that is 2R. For others it is a fixed won amount that matches the rent week or the salary week. The studio will not pick the number for you. We will ask you to say it out loud and then look at the last month to see whether you have ever obeyed a similar one.
If the honest answer is no, the cap on the new plan should be smaller than the one you have been breaking. A strict number you ignore is not stricter than a modest number you keep.
Where it sits on the page
On our workbook the cap has its own line under size, above the review. It is one sentence. “At minus 2R on the day, I am done. I do not reduce size and continue. I do not switch markets.” The second and third clauses matter. A cap that allows a smaller revenge trade is a pause, not an ending.
Sunday is a dull time to do this, which is why it works. The chart is closed. Nobody is daring you. Write the sentence, then leave it alone until the session is actually over.