Sarah trades index futures for a proprietary firm out of Chicago, and her desk looks less like a home office and more like a flight deck. Six monitors, arranged in two curved rows of three, each one doing exactly one job. Nothing overlaps. Nothing is decorative.
"The first year, I had charts stacked on top of charts," she says. "I thought more data meant more edge. It just meant more places to be slow." The current layout is the result of three redesigns — each one removing a screen's worth of noise rather than adding one.
The Layout
The center-top monitor runs a single instrument at three timeframes — that's the only chart she trades off. Directly below it sits the DOM (depth of market) ladder, full-width, because order flow is read, not glanced at. The two side monitors carry correlated instruments and a macro calendar; the far-right screen is reserved entirely for risk — open P&L, daily loss limit, and position size, always visible, never buried in a tab.
"If I have to click to see my risk, I've already made the mistake." — Sarah K.
The Workflow
Sarah's session starts 45 minutes before the New York open with a written plan: the level she's watching, the size she's risking, and the condition that invalidates the idea. That note stays taped to the monitor bezel for the whole session — a physical object between her and impulse trades.
What changed the most
- Removed all financial news headlines from view — she reads news before the session, not during it
- Moved the risk monitor from "somewhere I could check" to "somewhere I can't avoid seeing"
- Switched from six independent chart layouts to one linked layout, so every screen updates together
The result isn't a faster setup — it's a quieter one. "The gear didn't fix my trading," Sarah says. "It just stopped getting in the way of it."
Tunde A. Sep 20, 2026
The "taped note on the bezel" trick is so simple it's almost embarrassing I never tried it. Stealing this.