Andrews Pitchfork: Drawing Median-Line Channels to Read Trend
Andrews Pitchfork is three lines drawn off three pivots you choose by hand. The full construction, the median line as dynamic support and resistance, the two standard trade approaches, the Schiff and Modified Schiff variants, Alan Andrews and the Babson action-reaction lineage behind it, and an honest account of why two competent chartists draw two different forks from the same chart.
Most of what gets called an indicator is a formula. You feed it bars, it hands back a number, and if you and I run it on the same chart we get the same value to the decimal. Andrews Pitchfork is not that. It is a drawing tool. You click three points, the platform draws a median line and two parallel rays off those clicks, and from that moment every read the fork gives you is downstream of where your cursor landed. The geometry after the clicks is exact and mechanical. The clicks themselves are a judgment call, made by eye, with no rule anywhere that says which swing counts. That one property explains both why experienced chart readers keep it on the toolbar and why it is unusually easy to fool yourself with.
Quick Answer
Andrews Pitchfork is a hand-drawn trend channel built from three pivot points. Draw a line between the second and third pivots, find its midpoint, and run the median line from the first pivot through that midpoint. Two parallel rays from pivots two and three form the outer tines. The tines act as dynamic support and resistance, the median line as the channel's centre line. The three points are chosen by eye, so the fork is only as good as the pivots.
Everything past that sentence is detail, and the detail is where the tool either earns its place or quietly misleads you. The rest of this covers the exact construction, what the median line is supposed to do, the two trade approaches that recur across the literature, where the thing came from, the Schiff variants that exist to fix a fork drawn at the wrong angle, and the pivot-selection problem that sits underneath all of it.
What Is Andrews Pitchfork?
It is a chart annotation tool rather than a calculated indicator. Three lines get drawn on top of price: a median line down the centre and two parallel outer lines on either side of it, called tines because the finished shape looks like a pitchfork. All three extend forward off the right edge of the price action, which is the point of the exercise. The fork frames a trend as a channel and gives you a moving map of where price sits inside it.
The whole construction hangs off three pivot points, selected left to right in chronological order. In an uptrend that sequence is a trough, then a peak, then a higher trough: low, high, low. In a downtrend it inverts to peak, trough, peak. Each point has to be a genuine reaction high or reaction low, a place where price turned and the turn held for a while, not just any convenient bar. That requirement is where all of the tool's honesty problems start, and we will come back to it properly.
It helps to place the fork against the other channel tools, because the difference is structural rather than cosmetic. A Donchian Channel takes no opinion from you at all: it is the highest high and the lowest low of the last N bars, and the only thing you choose is N. A Keltner Channel is a moving average with an ATR multiple either side, which is two settings and no clicks. Both of those will draw identically on your chart and mine. Andrews Pitchfork will not, because it does not read the chart. It reads your three clicks.
How Do You Draw an Andrews Pitchfork?
Four steps, and the middle two are the ones most explanations skip over. On every platform in common use you only perform step one, because the drawing tool handles the rest, but the geometry matters for understanding why the fork behaves the way it does.
1. Pick three pivot points left to right. Low, high, low in an uptrend. High, low, high in a downtrend.
2. Draw a straight line from Point 2 to Point 3 and find its midpoint.
3. The median line is a ray from Point 1, through that midpoint, extended forward indefinitely.
4. The two tines are rays from Point 2 and from Point 3, each drawn parallel to the median line.
Step two is the piece that gives the fork its character. The line from Point 2 to Point 3 exists for one reason, which is to produce a midpoint, and it usually gets hidden the moment the fork is finished. Step three then runs the median line from the oldest pivot through that midpoint. The stretch between Point 1 and the midpoint is the handle. Nothing gets traded off the handle. Its only job is to set the angle of everything that comes after it.
Step four has a consequence worth pointing out, because almost nobody states it. You do not have to space the tines evenly, and you could not make them uneven if you tried. The median line passes through the exact midpoint of the segment joining Points 2 and 3, so any line parallel to it through Point 2 is necessarily the same perpendicular distance away as the parallel through Point 3. The symmetry is not a rule imposed on the drawing. It falls out of the midpoint, which means the channel width is decided entirely by how far apart Points 2 and 3 are, and by nothing else.
Three clicks, and the three lines they produce
Every element in the finished fork, and the specific job it is supposed to be doing.
| Element | How it is built | What it is read as |
|---|---|---|
| Point 1 (the anchor) | The oldest of the three pivots. A reaction low in an uptrend, a reaction high in a downtrend | The point the whole fork pivots from. Move it one bar and every line rotates |
| Point 2 | The next reaction point after it, so a swing high in an uptrend | One end of the construction line, and the origin of the upper tine |
| Point 3 | The most recent of the three, so a swing low in an uptrend | The other end of the construction line, and the origin of the lower tine |
| The 2-to-3 line | A straight segment joining Point 2 and Point 3, usually hidden once the fork is drawn | Nothing. It exists only so its midpoint can be located |
| Median line | A ray from Point 1 through the midpoint of the 2-to-3 line, extended forward indefinitely | The centre line of the channel. Internal support and resistance, and the read on trend health |
| Handle | The stretch of the median line between Point 1 and that midpoint | The part behind the fork. Nothing is traded off it, it just sets the angle |
| Upper tine | A ray from Point 2, parallel to the median line | Dynamic resistance in an uptrend. Where an advance is expected to stall |
| Lower tine | A ray from Point 3, parallel to the median line | Dynamic support in an uptrend. Where a pullback is expected to hold |
| Warning lines | Further parallels outside the tines at the same spacing. Only some platforms plot them | A rough ruler for how far outside the channel price has gone. Not part of the original tool |
You will never build any of this by hand. The pitchfork ships as a standard drawing tool on effectively every charting platform in use, TradingView, StockCharts, thinkorswim, NinjaTrader and Barchart among them, and the StockCharts ChartSchool entry on Andrews Pitchfork gives the canonical step-by-step version of the construction above. The reason to understand the geometry is not that you need to implement it. It is that the fork's failure modes all trace back to step one, and you cannot see step one from the finished picture.
What Does the Median Line Actually Do?
The two outer tines are read as dynamic support and resistance. In an uptrend the lower tine is where pullbacks are expected to find a floor and the upper tine is where the advance is expected to run out of room. Dynamic is the operative word: these are diagonal lines that move a little further up in price every bar, so a level that was support at 47.20 this morning is support at 47.35 tomorrow without anybody doing anything. That is the same behaviour as a rising trendline connecting swing lows, and the same reason a diagonal level is harder to work with than a flat horizontal one sitting at a fixed price.
The median line does two jobs at once. It works as a support and resistance level in its own right, sitting inside the channel and often catching pullbacks that never reach the lower tine. And it works as a read on trend health. In a clean uptrend, price spends most of its time above the median line and uses it as a floor. When price slips below the median line and stays there while the fork still points up, the disagreement is information: either the pullback is deeper than a normal one, or the slope you drew was too optimistic in the first place.
The 80% rule, and how much weight it deserves
Andrews claimed that price returns to the median line roughly 80 percent of the time, with the remaining 20 percent or so being sharp, isolated moves away from it. The claim gets repeated almost everywhere the tool is written about, usually with no attribution beyond Andrews himself, and it is the source of the median-line-as-magnet framing you see in most descriptions.
Treat it as the designer describing his intent, not as a measured statistic. There is no published study behind the number that anyone points to, the sample and the market it was supposedly drawn from are never specified, and at least one of the more careful rule-based write-ups on pitchfork trading does not carry the claim at all. That split matters. An 80 percent figure that a trader could actually rely on would be one of the strongest published edges in technical analysis, and the fact that it circulates as folklore rather than as a result tells you what it is.
There is also a specific behaviour that cuts directly against it. In fast markets, price sometimes tracks along one of the outer tines for an extended stretch, riding the boundary instead of reverting toward the centre, a pattern occasionally described as the channel sliding. If your plan is built on the assumption that price keeps coming back to the median line, that stretch is exactly when the assumption stops paying.
How Do You Trade an Andrews Pitchfork?
Two approaches recur across essentially every rule set written about the tool, and they are opposites, which is worth being clear-eyed about before adopting either.
Approach one: trade inside the fork
This one assumes the channel holds. In an uptrend you buy a bounce off the lower tine, put the stop just beyond the tine that was tested, and exit either at the opposite tine or when price breaks back through the median line against you. In a downtrend you do the mirror image and sell bounces off the upper tine. It is a mean-reversion trade taken inside a trend, using the tine as the reference level and the median line as the first place to reassess.
One practical consequence that rarely gets said plainly: your stop is on a slope. The tine moves every bar, so a stop placed just beyond it is a different price tomorrow than it is today, and if you leave a static stop order sitting there while the line climbs away from it, your actual risk grows quietly and your reward-to-risk is no longer the number you calculated at entry.
Approach two: trade the break
This one assumes the channel fails. A decisive close outside either tine is read as the trend channel breaking down, which invalidates the fork's directional bias or flips it. Most published versions of this rule add a confirmation step rather than acting on the close itself, typically waiting for price to retest the broken tine from the outside and fail there before entering. The confirmation exists because a single close outside a hand-drawn diagonal is weak evidence, and the retest is what separates a break from a wick.
Both approaches share a dependency that no rule set can remove. They both assume the fork is drawn correctly. Every entry level, every stop, and every target in both plans is measured off lines whose position was decided by three clicks you made before any of this started, which puts the pitchfork in a different category from the indicators that compute their own levels. The arithmetic downstream is precise. The thing it is precise about is your opinion.
The fork says the pullback is holding the lower tine. That is one opinion about one line you drew yourself.
Upload the screenshot and SnapPChart reads that single image against a fixed rubric, then returns a setup grade, an entry, a stop with the reasoning behind the level, targets, and the reward-to-risk those levels imply. Arguing with the grade is cheaper than arguing with the fill.
Grade this chartOne condition governs both approaches. The pitchfork draws on any instrument and any timeframe, and it is described almost universally as reliable only in genuinely trending conditions. In a range-bound tape, the channel has no real slope to describe, both tines get broken repeatedly, and the fork generates a stream of low-confidence signals off a structure that was never there. That is the same regime dependency behind trading momentum only when the tape is actually moving, and the pitchfork is more exposed to it than most tools because it has to be drawn before the regime is confirmed.
Who Invented Andrews Pitchfork?
Dr. Alan Hall Andrews, an engineer by training, developed the method and taught it through a paid course in the 1960s. He ran seminars for pit traders in New York and Chicago, and the course itself reportedly sold for around fifteen hundred dollars, which was a serious sum at the time. The engineering background is not a footnote. It shows up in the whole construction, which is a geometry exercise applied to price rather than a statistical one.
The lineage behind it is more interesting than the tool's name suggests. Andrews did not invent the underlying idea. He learned it from Roger Babson, the businessman and market forecaster, whose action-reaction concept applied a version of Newton's third law to price behaviour: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, and market moves should therefore be expected to react around some central normal line. Babson in turn got the idea from George Fillmore Swain, an MIT professor who had drawn a normal line through market data and suggested that Newton's law might describe the deviations around it. Andrews attended one of Babson's seminars, took the technique away, and later formalised it into his own Action-Reaction Course, named in tribute to where it came from. Optuma's history of median line analysis traces that chain in more detail than anywhere else I found.
Knowing the origin changes how you should hold the claims. The median line is a magnet because an engineer found a physics analogy persuasive, and the 80 percent figure is that same analogy expressed as a number. Neither came out of a test. That does not make the tool useless, plenty of durable chart techniques started as an analogy, but it does mean the confidence in the framing was never earned the way a measured result earns it. Worth noting in passing: Investopedia, which has a definition page for nearly every technical concept in circulation, carries no dedicated Andrews Pitchfork entry at all. For a tool this widely taught, that is a genuine gap in the reference literature.
When Should You Use a Schiff Pitchfork?
Start with the problem the variants exist to solve, because it is the most common way a technically correct fork turns out to be useless. The angle of the median line is set entirely by where Point 1 sits relative to the Point 2 and Point 3 swing. If Point 1 is very deep, at the bottom of a violent capitulation low, say, the resulting fork comes in extremely steep. Price cannot climb fast enough to stay inside it, breaks the lower tine almost immediately, and the tool reports a structural failure in a trend that is doing fine. The opposite error is a fork drawn too flat, which price runs clean through on the upside while the channel sits there describing nothing.
The Schiff family fixes this by moving the handle off the literal Point 1. In a Schiff Pitchfork, the starting point shifts in price to the midpoint between Point 1 and Point 2, staying on the same bar. Same three pivots, same midpoint of the 2-to-3 line, but the ray now begins halfway up instead of at the bottom, so the slope drops. The Modified Schiff shifts that starting point in both price and time, moving it halfway across as well as halfway up, so the median line is flatter than the standard fork and also begins later on the chart. TradingView's support documentation for the Schiff Pitchfork describes its origin as sitting at half the vertical and half the horizontal distance between the first two points, which is the shift plenty of other write-ups reserve for the Modified version rather than the plain one. The variants were never standardised, so the published definitions genuinely disagree with each other and two platforms can draw different channels off identical clicks. Draw all three on a chart you already know well and calibrate to what your own platform renders, because that is the only specification that affects your fills.
Same three pivots, three places to start the median line
| Variant | Where the handle sits | Effect on the channel | Reason to reach for it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Standard Andrews Pitchfork | On Point 1 itself, at the literal extreme of the move | The steepest of the three, because the median line starts from the full depth of the first pivot | The default, and correct when the trend's slope is well described by that pivot |
| Schiff Pitchfork | Shifted in price to the midpoint between Point 1 and Point 2, staying on the same bar | Flattens the median line without moving where it begins on the time axis | The standard fork comes in too steep for the trend it is supposed to be describing |
| Modified Schiff Pitchfork | Shifted to the midpoint between Point 1 and Point 2 in both price and time | Flattens it relative to the standard fork and starts the median line later on the chart | Point 1 sits both far below and far to the left, so the standard handle is aggressive twice over |
Which of the two Schiff constructions ends up flatter depends on the specific geometry of your three pivots, since moving the handle forward in time shortens the run as well as the rise. Both exist for the same reason, which is to take slope out of a fork the standard construction draws too aggressively. And both come with an obvious trap: switching variants after the standard fork has already broken is curve-fitting with extra steps. Choose the construction from the shape of the trend before you need it to be right, not from which version would have kept you in the trade.
Why Do Two Traders Draw Different Forks?
Because there is no rule that says which swing counts. StockCharts states it about as plainly as a reference source can, that there are no hard rules for point placement, and every serious write-up on the tool eventually admits the same thing. A reaction high is a place price turned, and price turns constantly. Which turns qualify as significant enough to anchor a fork is a judgment, and two competent chartists making that judgment in good faith on the same chart will produce forks with materially different slopes, different channel widths, and different support levels for tomorrow.
The single most-cited practical version of this problem is picking Point 3 too early. The third pivot is the most recent one, which means it is the one price has had the least time to confirm. You see what looks like a swing low, anchor the lower tine to it, and three bars later price makes a lower low that turns out to be the real pivot. The fork you drew is invalidated almost on contact, and the frustrating part is that it was never wrong about the trend. It was wrong about a point that had not finished forming when you clicked it.
This site already has a post about the other famous judgment-dependent chart technique, and the comparison is worth drawing carefully because the two are not subjective in the same way. Elliott Wave counting spreads its subjectivity across an entire labelling scheme that keeps getting revised as price moves, so a count that was a wave 3 last week becomes a wave 1 of a larger degree this week and the whole forecast shifts with it. The pitchfork concentrates its subjectivity into exactly three clicks, made once, and then stops. That is a smaller surface, and it is an auditable one: you can screenshot your three anchors, come back a month later, and check honestly whether you picked those points or whether you picked the points that produced the channel you wanted. It is the same discipline problem as deciding which swing to anchor a Fibonacci retracement to, where the levels are exact and the anchoring is not.
The failure that follows from all of this is not really a charting failure. Once you have drawn a fork, it is your fork, and the pull toward reading every subsequent bar as confirmation of it is strong. The tool does not push back. It draws whatever you tell it to and then projects it forward with perfect confidence for as long as you leave it on the chart.
Where Andrews Pitchfork Breaks
None of these are bugs. They are what a hand-anchored projection does in conditions it was not built for.
| Condition | What the fork does | Why it misleads |
|---|---|---|
| A range-bound, non-trending tape | Draws a channel with no real slope behind it, because there is no trend to slope with | Both tines get broken repeatedly and neither break means anything. The tool is describing a trend that is not there |
| Point 3 picked before the swing confirmed | Anchors the lower tine to a low that price has not finished making | The real pivot forms a few bars later and the fork is invalidated almost on contact. The most common practical mistake with the tool |
| A fork drawn too steep | Projects a median line rising faster than the trend actually rises | Price falls behind the channel and breaks the lower tine while the uptrend is still perfectly intact. A false exit dressed as a structural failure |
| A fork drawn too flat | Projects a channel shallower than the move | Price runs clean through the upper tine and keeps going, and the fork stops describing anything at all |
| Several overlapping forks on one chart | Fills the chart with parallel lines at every angle | Something is near a line everywhere, so every touch looks like a level and the read is diluted rather than sharpened |
| A gap straight through a tine | Registers as the decisive close outside the channel that the breakout rule is waiting for | An overnight gap through a hand-drawn diagonal is thin evidence, and a gap that fills by mid-morning has already unwound the signal |
| A thin, illiquid name | Anchors to swing highs and lows like it would on anything else | Those pivots are prints from a handful of orders rather than real turning points, so the noise is baked into the fork before the first line is drawn |
| A fast market sliding along one tine | Price tracks the upper or lower boundary for an extended stretch instead of reverting toward the median line | Every fade against that tine loses. The channel is still correct about direction and completely wrong about the mean-reversion it implies |
Two rows there deserve pulling out. The steep-fork row is the one that costs the most money, because it produces a false exit that looks exactly like a correct one: the lower tine breaks, the rule says the channel has failed, you are out, and the stock proceeds to make new highs inside a channel you should have drawn shallower. The overlapping-forks row is the one that creeps up on people over months. Nobody decides to put five pitchforks on a chart. They just never delete the old ones.
There is one further piece of pitchfork lore worth knowing about mainly so you recognise it when you see it. The Hagopian Rule holds that if price reverses before ever reaching the median line, that failure to reach it is a warning that the eventual move in the opposite direction may travel further than a normal reaction would. It is a named, specific rule and it appears in the pitchfork literature, but the sourcing for it is thin and there is no test behind it that I can point to. File it with the 80 percent figure.
Where the Fork Fits on a Real Chart
It answers one question well: given that a trend exists and given these three turning points, what does the channel that trend has been travelling in look like projected forward. That is genuinely useful, and it is not something a horizontal level map or a moving average gives you. What it does not do is tell you whether the trend exists, whether those three points were the right ones, or how much to risk. The sensible ordering is to establish the regime first with something that does not depend on your clicks, then draw the fork, then treat the tines as reference levels rather than as signals, which is the same layering logic behind the broader technical analysis overview on this site.
What a chart grader can and cannot see here
Worth being straight about, since this site sells a tool. SnapPChart has no Andrews Pitchfork field. It does not select pivot points, it does not compute a median line, it does not detect channels, and it carries no state for a pitchfork the way it does for the moving average stack, the VWAP relationship and volume behaviour. What it does is read a chart screenshot you upload. So if you have already drawn a fork on your own platform before taking that screenshot, those three lines are part of what the analysis sees, as geometry already present on the image. That is a picture of lines, not a verified construction: it cannot tell you whether your Point 3 was a real pivot, it cannot check that the tines are actually parallel to the median line, it cannot know whether you are looking at a standard fork or a Schiff, and it has no way to reproduce the drawing to see whether a different set of anchors would have told a different story. Which chart states a screenshot-based read genuinely carries and which it only infers from shape is the subject of the wider guide to how AI reads a chart, and a neutral description of what a single chart read covers sits on the AI chart analysis page. If a pitchfork is the reason you are taking the trade, validating the pitchfork stays your job.
Three pivots, left to right, each a real reaction point. A line from Point 2 to Point 3, its midpoint found, and the median line run from Point 1 through that midpoint. Two parallel tines from Points 2 and 3, automatically equidistant because of the midpoint. Tines read as dynamic support and resistance, median line as the centre and the health check. Trade the bounces inside it or trade a confirmed break of it, but remember the stop is on a slope. Use Schiff when the standard fork comes in too steep, and choose that before the fork breaks rather than after. And hold the whole thing loosely, because the only genuinely subjective part of the tool happened before the first line appeared.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Andrews Pitchfork the same thing as a linear regression channel?
No, and the difference is the thing most worth understanding about the tool. A regression channel is computed. You select a range of bars, the platform runs a least-squares fit through them, and it draws parallel bands a fixed distance either side. Every trader who selects the same bar range gets the same channel to the pixel. A pitchfork is anchored instead of computed. You pick three pivots and every line follows from those three clicks, so two traders working the same chart in good faith produce two different forks. Both tools involve a human decision, but the regression channel's decision is one range and the pitchfork's is three specific turning points, which is a much larger surface to be wrong on.
What timeframe is Andrews Pitchfork best on?
The construction does not care. It is three points and some parallel lines, so it draws identically on a 1-minute chart and a monthly one. What changes is the quality of the pivots underneath it. On a daily chart a reaction low is usually a multi-session event with real participation behind it and it tends to stay put. On a 1-minute chart a swing low can be one print from a thin moment in the tape, and the fork you anchor to it inherits that thinness. The useful discipline when drawing forks intraday is to require the pivot to still be visible one timeframe up. If it disappears when you zoom out, it was noise and so is the fork.
Should you redraw the pitchfork every time a new swing forms?
Mostly no, and the temptation is worth naming out loud. A fork that keeps getting redrawn is being fitted to price rather than framing it, and the redraw almost always happens right after the old fork stopped working, which is the worst possible moment to make a discretionary change. The other version of the same mistake is leaving every attempt on the chart. Four overlapping forks put a line within a few ticks of everywhere, so every touch looks like a level and none of them are. One fork per trend, redrawn only when the trend structure itself has genuinely changed, is the honest version of the rule.
Why does my pitchfork look different from the one in a tutorial on the same chart?
Three usual reasons, in roughly this order. You clicked different bars, which is the big one and the central subject of this post. Your platform may be defaulting to a Schiff variant rather than the standard construction, which moves the handle and changes the slope before you have done anything at all. Or a snap-to-price setting pulled your click to the nearest high or low rather than the exact point you aimed at, which on a low timeframe can land several bars away from what you intended. Check which variant is selected first, then decide deliberately whether you want the snapping on.
What are warning lines on a pitchfork?
Extra parallel lines that some platforms plot outside the two tines, spaced at the same interval as the gap between the median line and a tine. The idea is that if price closes through a tine you have somewhere to watch rather than nothing at all. They are not part of the original construction, not every platform ships them, and they are produced by repetition rather than derived from anything in the chart, so each line further out is a weaker claim than the one before it. They work as a visual ruler for how far outside the channel price has travelled. They do not work as targets.
This article is for educational and informational purposes only and is not investment, financial or trading advice. The three-point construction, the median line and tine geometry, the dynamic support and resistance interpretation, the two trade approaches described, the Schiff and Modified Schiff variants, the Hagopian Rule, and the attribution of the method to Dr. Alan Hall Andrews in the 1960s along with the Roger Babson and George Fillmore Swain lineage behind it are the conventional published accounts reproduced by charting platforms and reference sources. The 80 percent median-line claim is presented in that literature as Andrews' own assertion and is reproduced here as such rather than as a verified or reproducible statistic; no study is cited for it and none is claimed. The price levels and chart behaviour described in the diagrams and in the text are illustrative constructions built to make the geometry visible, not real securities or real trading sessions. No rule set, variant, or combination described here has been backtested by me and no edge is claimed or implied. Andrews Pitchfork is a manually drawn interpretive tool whose output depends entirely on which three points a human selects, and different reasonable selections produce different channels and different conclusions from the same chart. Day trading and active trading carry a substantial risk of loss and are not suitable for every investor. SnapPChart grades a static chart screenshot you upload and returns a setup grade, entry, stop, targets and reasoning for that single image; it does not draw, compute, detect or validate an Andrews Pitchfork, does not select pivot points, does not identify median lines or trend channels, does not calculate any indicator value itself, does not scan the market, and does not track your account, positions or P&L. It can only account for annotations that are visibly drawn on the image you upload. Do your own analysis, size positions so that being wrong is survivable, and consider speaking to a licensed financial professional about your own circumstances before trading.
Writes about AI-assisted day trading, technical analysis, and the systems traders actually use to stay disciplined.
You drew the fork. The question nobody else can answer for you is whether the setup inside it is worth risking money on.
Three clicks produced a channel, and the channel now agrees with whatever you already thought. Upload the screenshot and SnapPChart reads that one image against a fixed rubric, then returns a setup grade, an entry, a stop with the reasoning behind the level, targets, and the reward-to-risk those levels imply. Skipping one bad trade covers the cost of finding out.