A desk note describes what the market looks like: where the structure sits, what changed overnight, what the day would have to do to be unusual. It is not a set of trades, and the difference matters more than it appears.
Why not a signal
A signal needs an entry, a stop, a size and an exit. Size depends on your capital and existing exposure. The stop depends on your timeframe. None of that is knowable by someone writing for a general audience, and a note that supplied them would be supplying invented specifics.
A note can say where the structure is and what usually happens around it. Turning that into a position is work only you can do, because only you know the rest of your book.
What it is genuinely useful for
Noticing. The main value of reading a competent read of the session is discovering the things you would not have looked at — a level that moved overnight, a volatility reading that left its usual band, positioning that built somewhere unexpected.
It is also useful as a check. If your read and the note disagree, one of you has missed something, and finding out which is more valuable than either read alone.
How to read one badly
Skipping to the conclusion. The reasoning is the product; the conclusion is a summary of it. A reader who takes the last paragraph and ignores the evidence has extracted the one part that cannot be checked.
The test
After reading a note, you should be able to say what would make it wrong. If you cannot, either the note did not commit to anything or you read it for reassurance rather than information.
None of it is financial advice, and that is not a disclaimer so much as a description of the format.