A weekend checklist before any EA touches your account on Monday

Most EA disasters do not start with a bad trade. They start on a quiet Sunday evening, with a Windows update nobody noticed, a VPS invoice nobody paid, or a lot size that made sense three months ago.

The market is closed on the weekend. That makes it the one moment when you can check everything without pressure. Here is the checklist we run ourselves, in order, before any Monday open.

1. Is the machine actually going to be on?

• VPS or home PC: confirm it is running and reachable, not just that it was running last week.
• Check for pending Windows updates. A forced reboot at 2 a.m. on Monday closes your terminal with the EA inside. Install updates now, reboot now, on your schedule.
• If you use a VPS, check the renewal date. An expired VPS fails silently: no error, just no trading.

2. Is the terminal really trading?

• Open MetaTrader and look at the chart corner. On MT4 you want the smiley face on the EA, on MT5 the EA name without a diagnostic mark. A sad face or a grayed icon means AutoTrading is off or the EA lost its permissions.
• Open the Experts and Journal tabs. Scroll the last few days. Errors like "trade context busy", "not enough money" or repeated reconnects are early warnings, not noise.
• Confirm the account is connected with the right login. After a Windows update, terminals sometimes start with the wrong or no account.

3. Do you have enough free margin?

• Check free margin against the worst case: all your EAs holding a position at the same time, at current lot sizes.
• If you withdrew money recently, remember the EA does not know that. Lot settings that fit the old balance may be too heavy for the new one.

4. What does the calendar say about next week?

• Scan the economic calendar for the week: central bank decisions, CPI, NFP. You do not need to predict anything, you need to know when volatility is scheduled.
• Decide in advance how you handle those days. Some traders let systematic EAs run through news, some pause. Both are defensible, but decide on Saturday, not in the middle of the spike.

5. Are your set files backed up?

• Export the current inputs of every EA to a .set file and copy it somewhere outside the VPS.
• If the machine dies on Tuesday, you want to be reinstalling for ten minutes, not reconstructing parameters from memory.

6. Does the lot size still match the balance?

• Recalculate: with your current lot, what does a full stop loss cost in money, and what percent of the account is that?
• If the account grew, you may be under-risking, which is fine. If the account shrank and the lot stayed fixed, the same stop now bites a bigger share of your capital. Adjust deliberately, on the weekend, not after a loss.

7. What if Monday opens with a gap?

Markets sometimes open far from Friday's close, especially metals and indices after weekend news. Three things to know in advance:

• If you hold positions over the weekend, a gap can jump past your stop loss. The stop still executes, but at the first available price, so the loss can be larger than planned. Know this number before it happens.
• Spreads in the first minutes after the open are often several times wider than normal. An EA that trades immediately at the open pays that spread.
• Do not panic-close a position just because the open looks ugly. Check what your EA is designed to do first: a system with a defined stop loss already has an answer for this scenario. Overriding it by hand is where many manual losses come from.

Ten minutes that replace a bad month

None of these steps is clever. That is the point: the checklist protects you from boring failures, and boring failures are the most common kind.

If you want a low-stakes way to build this routine, run it on a demo account first. Our own Wonder 8 is a free EA for USDJPY H1 (also available for MT4), with a fixed 0.01 lot and a stop loss and take profit on every position. It is a convenient test subject: install it on demo, then practice the whole checklist on it this weekend, from the smiley check to the .set backup.

Whatever EA you run, remember that trading involves risk of loss and past performance does not guarantee future results. A checklist reduces operational mistakes, it does not remove market risk.