Seven questions, asked in this order

§1Three questions about the rule, before anything else

These come first because they can end the process, and because they are the only items on the list that you can answer without holding an opinion.

• What exactly does this market settle on? The question, the field, the point in time and the source of the result. A market whose settlement you cannot state in one sentence is a market you have not finished reading.
• What happens if a competitor does not take part? Non-runner no bet or plain antepost, and which absences count. This is on the non-runner page, and it is the single most expensive item to get wrong.
• Is this market the same question at another operator? Same name is not the same market. If the settlement rules differ, the prices are not comparable and the comparison is not a comparison.

§2Two questions about money and time

These are about the cost of the horizon rather than the quality of the price, and they are the questions people skip because the answer is uncomfortable.

• How long would this money be unavailable, and is that acceptable on its own terms, regardless of the outcome? The horizon is the cost. If the answer depends on the position working out, the position is too large for the horizon.
• How many of my existing positions does this one share its facts with? Several futures on one season are frequently one bet expressed more than once. Counting them is the whole of the exercise on the capital page.

§3Two questions about the market

• Which phase is this market in, and what kind of uncertainty am I being paid to carry? Opening fields and settled fields are different trades with different margins, as the calendar page sets out.
• What kind of news could arrive, and what would each kind do to this field? This is the only forward-looking work the horizon allows. If nothing could move the market for three months, that is also worth knowing.

§4One question about leaving

• If this position goes wrong, what would I actually do, and would I be able to do it? A cash-out quote on a long-horizon market is a bid made by the party holding the other side, and it tends to be withdrawn at the moment it is wanted. The honest answer may be "hold it to settlement", which is a perfectly good answer — as long as it is the intended one.

§5After you have placed it

Two rules of thumb, offered as descriptions rather than as discipline. First, the position no longer needs decisions: the decisions were all made above, and the ones available after entry are the expensive ones. Second, the price you paid is a number to be recorded and then ignored — it is not an input into anything that happens next, however insistently it presents itself as one.

• Record the reasoning
• Record the rule
• Stop re-deciding
• Let settlement do the work

And the limits that exist on any licensed account — deposit, loss and time limits, a reality check, a time-out and self-exclusion — apply to a season the same way they apply to an evening. Self-exclusion is the strongest of them precisely because it cannot be undone in the moment when it would matter most.¹

1. 1The checklist is a set of questions, not a staking method, a selection method or a claim that answering them well produces a profitable position. It exists so that a reader recognises the costs of a long horizon before accepting them.