how i handle the 2am shift without babysitting every fill
hey all, night owl here as usual ☕
figured i'd write up how my overnight routine actually works since a few people asked in another thread. nothing fancy, just what's survived a year of me being awake at weird hours.
basically i split my night into two modes. first couple hours i'm actually watching — that's when i place anything discretionary, manual entries, whatever. after about 3am my brain is soup and i've learned the hard way that soup-brain me makes bad decisions, so everything after that is either already bracketed or it doesn't exist. every position gets its exit orders attached at entry, no "i'll set the stop in a sec". that one habit fixed more of my problems than any indicator ever did.
the part i still fight with is order state. crypto never closes so there's no clean daily reset like equities have, and i've woken up to situations where i genuinely couldn't remember if something was a leftover from tuesday or a fresh fill. so now i tag everything with a session label when it goes in and i do a five minute reconcile before i go to sleep. Open orders vs what i think is open, and if those two lists don't match i cancel everything and start clean rather than trying to figure it out tired.
other thing: i keep the number of pairs stupid small at night. like three. liquidity gets thin and spreads widen and i've paid for that education already. wider stops, smaller size, fewer things to look at.
curious what other overnight/odd-hours people do. specifically— do you let anything run unattended while you're actually asleep, or do you flatten? i've gone back and forth on this for months and still don't have a rule i'm happy with.