A trading plan is a one-page document that makes your decisions while you are calm, so the version of you inside a live trade doesn't have to. That is its entire job. This sheet is a framework in the literal sense: it walks through five short sections, and by the end you can fill each one in and own a working plan. It is also built around the most reliable finding about trading plans — they fail from complexity, not from laziness. The plan you will actually follow is the one short enough to be followed.
Why written beats remembered
The trader who places a stop-loss before entering and the trader deciding whether to honour it twenty minutes later are, for practical purposes, two different people. The first is calm, has no money at risk, and weighs both directions evenly. The second is watching an open loss tick against them, and every cognitive bias in the catalog is now voting. Decisions made live are systematically worse than the same decisions made in advance — not because you are weak, but because everyone's are. A plan is how the calm version of you outvotes the stressed one.
Remembered intentions cannot do this work, because memory renegotiates. “I keep my losses small” bends comfortably around whatever just happened; a written “0.5% per trade, closed at the stop, no exceptions” does not bend, it gets either followed or visibly broken. That visibility is the point. A written plan turns every trade into a data point about your own behaviour — which is what makes the journal, this plan's companion instrument, worth keeping at all.
Be clear about what the document is not. A plan is not a strategy — it does not predict anything, and it works unchanged whether your current setups are good, mediocre, or still imaginary. It is the container that keeps the account intact while you find out which. That separation is why the plan comes first in this survey's ordering: a trader with rules and no edge loses slowly and learns; a trader with an edge and no rules usually never survives long enough to prove it.
The one-page anatomy
Five sections, each answerable in one to three lines. If a section of your draft runs longer than that, you are writing an essay, not a plan — cut until a stranger could check your next trade against it in under a minute.
| Section | The question it answers | Example entry |
|---|---|---|
| Markets | What do I trade — and what do I ignore? | EUR/USD and GBP/USD only, London morning |
| Setups | What exactly must be true before I enter? | Pullback to a level marked before the session, on my planned timeframe |
| Risk rules | What can one trade — or one day — cost me? | 0.5% per trade · −2% daily stop · one euro position at a time |
| Routine | When do I trade, and when do I not? | Levels at 08:00, trade until 11:30, journal at close |
| Review | When does the plan itself change? | Last Saturday of the quarter, from journal data only |
Everything else you know about trading — the analysis, the indicators, the macro view — feeds the Setups line, and only that line. The other four sections are deliberately analysis-free, because they are the ones that keep the account alive while the Setups line is still being figured out.
Two of the five deserve a word each. Markets is a fence, not a wishlist: naming two pairs means declining the other fifty, including whatever moved dramatically this morning — the fence is what makes your journal comparable from week to week. Routine is the section beginners skip and regret: a defined window with a defined end is itself a risk rule, because the trade taken four hours after your session ended is almost never in the plan. Write the times down, including the journalling step at close.
Risk rules that need no judgment
The risk section carries the plan, and its design rule is strict: nothing in it may require an opinion at execution time. Three rules meet that bar. The first is fixed-fraction position sizing — risking the same small percentage of the account on every trade, whatever your conviction. Conviction is precisely the variable you cannot trust live, so the rule ignores it.
position size = risk amount ÷ (stop distance × pip value)
$5,000 account at 1% risk → $50 per trade
= $50 ÷ (25 pips × $10 per pip per lot)
= 0.2 lots — a $50 loss if the stop is hit, a $50 gain 25 pips the other way
Note the symmetry in the worked line: the same 25 pips produces the same $50 in either direction. Sizing does not tilt the odds — it caps what being wrong costs, so that no streak of ordinary losses can do structural damage. The second rule is the daily loss limit: a fixed drawdown for the day (−2% is common) at which the platform is closed, because the trader who has just lost three trades is the worst-qualified person to take the fourth. The third caps correlated exposure — one position per currency, or a maximum of two open trades — so that three “different” euro trades cannot quietly become one triple-sized bet.
The if-then format
Intentions become rules when they are written as condition and action — if this, then that. The test of a well-written rule: a stranger reading your journal could mark every trade as followed or violated without asking you a single question.
- Intention: “I'll keep losses small.” Rule: “If an open trade reaches −0.5% of the account, it is closed. No widening the stop, no averaging down.”
- Intention: “I'll stop when it's not my day.” Rule: “If the day's realized loss reaches −2%, the platform is closed until tomorrow.”
- Intention: “I'll let winners run sensibly.” Rule: “If price reaches the take-profit set at entry, the trade closes there — the target and the risk-reward ratio were decided before entry and do not move during the trade.”
- Intention: “I'll trade less when unfocused.” Rule: “If I have slept under six hours or am trading outside my routine window, no new positions.”
Four or five of these cover a beginner's entire decision surface. Resist adding more: every additional rule is one more thing to violate, and violations — not market moves — are what dissolve plans. Notice that half the rules above are no-trade rules. That is the correct proportion: a plan earns most of its keep by specifying when you do nothing, because doing nothing is the action no platform button encourages and no open chart makes easy.
The plan-violation protocol
You will break the plan. Everyone does, usually within the first two weeks, and a plan that pretends otherwise has no answer ready for its most predictable event. So the protocol is written into the page itself: when you violate a rule, you log the violation in the journal with the trigger that caused it, you finish the session at half size or not at all, and you re-read the plan before the next one. No self-punishment beyond that — the goal is data, not guilt.
The protocol matters because of what the alternative looks like. An unlogged violation that happens to win teaches you the plan is optional; two more of those and the plan is decoration. A logged violation, win or lose, stays a violation — and a month of logs will show you which rule you break, under which conditions. That pattern is the most valuable output your first quarter of trading will produce.
The quarterly revision
Plans must change — markets shift, your skill changes, a rule turns out to be miscalibrated. The discipline is in when and why, never whether. Revision happens on a schedule (quarterly is a sensible default), from journal evidence rather than from feelings, and one change at a time so you can tell what the change did. The one moment you may never revise is mid-trade or mid-drawdown: that is not revision, it is renegotiation by the stressed version of you, which is exactly who the document exists to overrule.
A worked revision, to make it concrete: the quarter's journal shows trades taken after 11:00 lost on average while earlier ones broke even. The revision shortens the routine window by half an hour — one line edited, dated, with the evidence noted beside it. Next quarter checks whether the change earned its place. That is the whole loop: small, slow, and boring on purpose, because a plan that changes dramatically is not a plan, it is a mood with formatting.
Fill the five sections in tonight — badly is fine. A mediocre plan followed for a quarter produces a journal that can improve it; a perfect plan that is never finished produces nothing. Then give it five demo sessions before any live money: the plan is a hypothesis, and the demo account is where hypotheses are allowed to fail for free.
Your equity, your risk fraction, your stop — the size your plan actually implies.
Five sessions, real prices, zero judgment calls left to the moment — the cheapest test a plan will ever get.