# How to Trade the Golden Quarter > A trading kit for the Golden Quarter event days: the launch checklist, the morning read, the daily action grid, the same-day retrospective and the lost-sales review. Templates, rules and owners from an operator’s own peak notes. Free PDF, no form. Source: https://barkingcat.ai/thinking/how-to-trade-the-golden-quarter/ ## Thinking · The trading kit · October 2026 Five tools for the event days, each with its template, its rules and its owner. A companion to Bulletproof for the Golden Quarter. Download the kit as a PDF: [eight pages of printable templates, no form, no email, no gate.](https://barkingcat.ai/assets/how-to-trade-the-golden-quarter.pdf) By the week before the event the plan is fixed: the stock is bought, the offers are agreed and the media is committed. What remains is the trading, and trading decides how much of the plan turns into margin. This kit covers that stretch, from the launch checks to the review two weeks after the last day. It assumes the readiness question has been answered. Whether to trade the event, and how hard, is what [Bulletproof for the Golden Quarter](https://barkingcat.ai/thinking/bulletproof-for-the-golden-quarter/) settles. Use the playbook first, then this. ## The kit ## The five tools ### 01 · Launch checklist The week before Day 0. Owned by the event lead. Four alignments first, then ten launch checks, each with a name against it. ### 02 · Morning read Every event day, circulated before the meeting. Owned by trading. Five readings in the same order every morning. ### 03 · Daily action grid Every event day, written at the meeting. Owned by the event lead. One line per action, one owner per line, rewritten daily. ### 04 · Same-day retrospective The end of each event day. Ten minutes, with every function, written down. ### 05 · Lost-sales review Within two weeks of the last day. Owned by commercial. The most useful single document a retailer can produce after peak. **Starting late?** If the event has already begun and none of this is in place, run the morning read and the grid tomorrow. They need no preparation. Then put the date for the lost-sales review in the diary today. ## Before you start ## Set the dates now Every date in the kit counts from Day 0, the first day of the event. Fix these five before anything else, and put the last two in the diary of everyone who will attend them. The worked example is an event that starts on Black Friday and runs to Cyber Monday. **Agree the review date before the event starts.** A review left to whoever has time after peak does not get written, because nobody has time after peak. **From the field.** My kick-off ran fourteen weeks before Day 0, which is earlier than most teams want to think about the event and about right. In the second of two cycles I have notes for, no formal review was written. What survived was a list of capabilities wanted for the following year, made on the last day of trading. ## Tool 01 · The week before ## Launch checklist Owned by the event lead, run from Day 0 less seven to Day 0 less one, and done when every line is ticked with a name against it. Tick the four alignments before you start the launch checks. These are the people who meet the customer when something goes wrong, and a customer service team that learns the terms of the offer from a customer is already behind. ### The four alignments - **Customer service.** They know the offer, the terms and the expected volume. - **Delivery.** Capacity matches the forecast. - **IT.** The event is confirmed with whoever runs the platform. - **Stores.** Store operations know what is online and what is not. ### The launch checks - **Target.** One number, agreed. - **Offer and business rules.** The mechanic, its limits and its terms, tested end to end. - **Delivery promise.** A test order placed for every gift and bundle combination, and the promise date read on each. - **Hero products.** Named, in stock and published. - **Merchandising plan.** Which products sit where, written down. - **Creative.** Ready for every channel and reviewed across functions. - **Marketing activity and spend.** Confirmed against the target. - **Communications.** Email, web and app push scheduled, and the link held back until go-live. - **Staffing.** Who is on, and who is on call, by name. - **Load.** A number written in: what happens above that many concurrent users? **From the field.** My checklist for a one-day event ran to three pages. Page one held only the four alignments, all ticked before page two was started. The load line carried a number even on a platform we had built for two million concurrent users, because a question without one gets a reassuring answer. The test order is there because one September a free gift on a large item gave several hundred customers a delivery date already in the past, fixed the same day because somebody was looking. ## Tool 02 · Every event day ## Morning read Owned by trading and circulated before the meeting: the same five readings, in the same order, every morning. The meeting decides what to do about them. Thirty minutes of somebody reading a dashboard aloud decides nothing. - **Read by category, never only the total.** A total hides the category that is failing. - **Never skip line 2.** The mix moves during an event, and sales can rise while the business sells the wrong things. - **Every stock-out on line 3 goes to the grid.** Each one is a customer who came for the advertised product and found it gone. From the field. One morning during a peak event I ran, the read showed this: 6% Sales up 46% Orders up 27% Average order value down Read only the first number and it was a good day. The other two showed customers buying a different, cheaper mix from the one the stock had been bought for. ## Tool 03 · Every event day ## Daily action grid Written at the morning meeting and owned by the event lead. Each line on the morning read that needs action becomes a line here. - **“When” takes three values only: this morning, today or tomorrow.** Anything longer is not a trading action. Log it for the lost-sales review and keep it off the grid. - **One owner per line, from a short list.** Set the list before Day 0. Mine was trading, marketing, commercial and the site experience team. An action owned by two functions is owned by neither by lunchtime. - **Rewrite the grid every morning.** Yesterday’s unfinished lines are carried over deliberately or dropped deliberately, never left to drift. ## Tool 04 · End of each event day ## Same-day retrospective Ten minutes at the end of each event day, with every function in the room. Five headings, asked while the day is still fresh. Write the answers down: by the following week nobody will remember which banner was late. For each heading, record what happened, the fix for next time and the owner of the fix. The PDF has the form. **From the field.** From my note after a one-day event. Under marketing plan: “Ensure link not shared until go live”. Under product: “NO offline only products are published”. Under creative: prepare banners earlier and share the homepage in advance. None of those is sophisticated. Each was a real problem on the day, and each became a line on the next launch checklist. ## Tool 05 · Within two weeks of the last day ## Lost-sales review Value what the event did not sell. This is the most useful single document a retailer can produce after peak, and the one most often left unwritten. Owned by commercial, delivered as one spreadsheet and a covering note, it turns “we could have done with more stock” into named lines with a value against each. - **Take the top 30 products in each category.** - **Lay actual sales against stock on hand for every day of the event.** - **Mark each day a product was out of stock.** - **Value the sales lost on those days.** A simple basis: the product’s average daily sales on the days it was in stock, multiplied by the days it was out, at the event price. - **Send it to the people planning the next event,** with the date of that event in the covering note. The covering note carries five things: the event and its dates, total lost sales and the top ten lines, the lessons in plain words, the date of the next event, and the date of next year’s kick-off. **From the field.** After the first cycle, the review was one spreadsheet and a short covering note, circulated within days and used for the next event the following week. The lessons list from that year, written down the following July as the first input to the next plan, read: “COMPLETE PLAN EARLIER”, “ROBUST BACK UP PLAN IN PLACE”, “NUMBER OF KEY LINES OOS EARLY IN CAMPAIGN”, “DEPTH IN HERO ITEMS + GOOD ALTERNATIVES”. The capitals are in the original. Open next year’s kick-off with your own version. ## Sources ## Where this comes from These tools come from my own notes on two cycles of the same event at one retailer, with a marketplace partner carrying a large share of sales. One of the cycles ran during the pandemic. Change them to fit the business: a retailer with no marketplace has one fewer thing to read each morning, and a retailer with 400 stores has several more. The readiness question sits upstream of all of it, in [Bulletproof for the Golden Quarter](https://barkingcat.ai/thinking/bulletproof-for-the-golden-quarter/). ## Contact steve@barkingcat.ai Barking Cat Advisory Limited. Registered in England and Wales, company number 17338003.