risk-mgmt

Reading your Strategy Heatmap (and acting on it)

Find your profitable and damaging trading windows from real fills

15 min · intermediate

What you'll have when finished

  • Identify your single most profitable hour-of-week and most damaging one
  • Know whether to pause, schedule-filter, or rebuild based on the pattern
  • Have at least one concrete change to your trading schedule

Before you start

  • Patterns under 50 closed round-trips are noise, not signal
  • A profitable Monday today does not guarantee a profitable Monday next quarter — market regimes shift
  • All times are UTC — convert to your timezone before acting

Walkthrough

  1. Confirm you have enough closed round-trips

    CEX Trade → Strategy Heatmap. If you see "Insufficient closed round-trips", check the breakdown table — it shows how many entries each source has and how many have closed. You need at least 50 closed round-trips total before the heatmap is statistically meaningful. Open positions and pure buys don't count.

    Success criteria: You see the 7×24 matrix with at least 50 closed round-trips in the KPI card

  2. Look at All sources first

    Source pill = All sources. This is the aggregate across Smart Trade + Grid Bot + DCA Safety + CEX manual. Note the Total realized P&L and overall Win rate. Then read the Best window and Worst window cards — these are your single most profitable and most damaging 1-hour buckets across the entire history.

    Success criteria: You can recite "best is X-day at HH:00 UTC, worst is Y-day at HH:00 UTC"

  3. Convert UTC to your timezone

    The grid is UTC. If you live US Eastern, subtract 4-5 hours (depending on DST). If you live Europe, add 1-2. A "worst window at 02:00 UTC" might actually be your 10 PM the previous evening — a window you trade emotionally after a long workday.

    Success criteria: You have noted what time your best and worst windows are in YOUR local time

  4. Check the row totals (right column)

    Look at the ∑ day column. A row that is all green or mostly green means that day works for you. A row that is red overall means something about that day costs you money. Common pattern: Sunday red because weekend liquidity is thin and bots get whipsawed.

    Success criteria: You have identified at least one day-of-week pattern (e.g., "Sundays cost me")

  5. Filter by source — find the offender

    Click Grid Bot → look at the matrix. Then Smart Trade. Then DCA Safety. Then CEX Trading (manual). One source usually drives most of the red. That is the one to fix. CEX Trading manual reds often reveal impulse trading — the patterns look very different from automated bot patterns.

    Success criteria: You know which source is your biggest loser and by how much

  6. Pick one action

    CASE A — bot losing on specific day: wrap the strategy in a Conditional Bot with a day-of-week filter (post-launch feature). For now, manually Pause the bot during the offending window. CASE B — manual CEX losing at specific hour: block yourself from trading that hour (close the app at 9 PM local). CASE C — Grid Bot row-totals all red: the range is wrong, rebuild the grid with a tighter or wider range.

    Success criteria: You have implemented one concrete change based on the heatmap

  7. Re-check after 4 weeks

    Come back in a month. Did the change help? The new Best/Worst windows should reflect your edit — if the worst window now shows fewer trades, the schedule filter worked. If the pattern is unchanged, the cause is something other than time-of-day (maybe a regime indicator, not a clock).

    Success criteria: You have a documented before/after comparison

What's next

You are now reading your own fills with intent. Pair this with [[stress-test-survival-checklist]] for the same strategies — heatmap tells you WHEN they work; stress test tells you whether they SURVIVE big events. Together they form a complete validation loop.