Trading Plan Template: How to Write a Plan You Can Follow

A trading plan is a written document that decides, in advance, what you will trade, when you will enter, when you will not trade, how you will exit, how much you will risk, and when you will stop for the day. It converts trading from a series of live opinions into a repeatable process you can audit later.

The value is not the document itself. It is that decisions are made while you are calm, specific, and not holding a position. During a fast session your job becomes narrow: check whether the conditions in the plan are present, and act or pass. This guide gives a full template you can copy, an example filled in for day trading, and the review cadence that keeps a plan current.

Trading plan vs strategy vs journal

These three words are used interchangeably and should not be. They answer different questions, and confusing them is why many traders own a "plan" that never changes their behavior.

• Strategy: the edge itself — the specific setup, conditions, and expected payoff you believe repeats.
• Trading plan: the operating manual around the strategy — sizing, limits, session hours, exits, no-trade conditions, and what to do when things go wrong.
• Journal: the record of what actually happened, trade by trade, so the plan can be evaluated against evidence rather than memory.

A strategy without a plan produces inconsistent sizing and improvised exits. A plan without a journal cannot be checked, because you will not remember which rules you broke. Start the plan and the trading journal together, since each one is much weaker alone.

The trading plan template

Copy the ten sections below into a document, a note, or your journal description. Fill each one with your own specifics. Keep it to one or two pages — a plan you cannot recall under pressure is not operational.

Section 1 — Trader profile and objective

• Account size allocated to this strategy, and capital you will not add to it.
• Time available per day, and which sessions you can genuinely attend.
• Style: scalp, intraday, swing, or position — chosen to fit the time above.
• Objective stated as process, for example "follow the plan on every trade for 40 trades", not a target profit figure.
• Review date when this plan version can be changed.

Stating an objective as process rather than profit matters because you control execution and you do not control outcomes over a small sample. A profit target invites size increases and extra trades at exactly the moments you should be doing neither.

Section 2 — Markets, instruments, and hours

• The specific instruments you will trade, listed by name.
• Timeframes for context, signal, and execution.
• Session windows with start and end times, including a hard cutoff for new entries.
• Minimum liquidity or spread conditions required to take a trade.
• Instruments explicitly excluded, such as illiquid names or new listings.

Section 3 — Entry rules

Write entries as a sequence of conditions that must all be true. Every condition should be observable on the chart or in data, not inferred from how the move "feels".

1. Context: the market state required before the setup counts, such as a defined trend, range, or session bias.
2. Level: the specific price zone where you will look for the trade.
3. Trigger: the exact event that starts the entry, such as a close beyond a level or a confirmed rejection.
4. Confirmation: any additional filter, kept to one, since each extra filter reduces sample size.
5. Invalidation: the price that proves the idea wrong before you enter, which also defines your stop.
6. Execution: order type, and how much slippage you will accept before passing on the trade.

Section 4 — No-trade rules

No-trade rules are the most under-written part of most plans and often the most valuable. They remove the marginal trades that quietly consume the profit produced by good ones.

• No trades before the session window opens or after the entry cutoff.
• No trades during scheduled high-impact news unless the strategy is explicitly built for it.
• No trades when the setup is missing any required condition, including "almost" versions.
• No trades after the daily loss limit or the daily trade cap is reached.
• No trades when you are sick, sleep-deprived, rushed, or trading from a phone in transit.
• No trades in an instrument you have not defined in Section 2.
• No re-entry into a stopped-out idea unless the plan specifies re-entry conditions.

If your journal shows a cluster of losses in a specific hour, mood, or instrument, that cluster becomes a new no-trade rule. This is how overtrading and FOMO entries get engineered out rather than resisted by willpower.

Section 5 — Exit rules

Specify all four exit paths before entry, because each one will occur regularly and each one is easy to improvise badly.

1. Stop loss: placed at invalidation, entered with the position, and not widened.
2. Target: the profit objective, expressed in R or at a structural level.
3. Partial exits: if used, state the fraction, the level, and what happens to the remaining stop.
4. Time stop: the point at which a trade that has not worked is closed regardless of price.
5. Management: the single condition under which a stop may move, such as to breakeven after a defined milestone.

Moving a stop away from price is the most expensive habit a plan can permit, because it silently converts a planned 1R loss into an unbounded one and corrupts every risk statistic you calculate afterward. The guide on why moving stops destroys your data covers the mechanism in detail.

Section 6 — Risk and position sizing

• Risk per trade as a fixed percentage of account equity, defined before the session.
• Position size formula: risk amount divided by the distance from entry to stop.
• Maximum open risk across all positions at once.
• Correlation cap, so several positions responding to the same driver count as one risk.
• Maximum leverage, and whether it is ever increased.
• The equity level at which risk per trade is reduced, and the level at which trading stops.

Express results in R rather than currency so trades of different sizes remain comparable. R-multiples make it possible to calculate expectancy and to see drawdown in units of your own planned risk instead of a number that changes with account size.

Section 7 — Daily limits

• Maximum loss per day, stated in R, after which the platform is closed.
• Maximum number of trades per day, including scratches.
• Maximum consecutive losses before a mandatory break.
• Optional stop-for-the-day-on-profit rule, if your journal shows late-session giveback.
• Weekly and monthly loss limits that trigger a review rather than a bigger position.

Section 8 — Pre-market and post-session routine

1. Before the session: check the economic calendar, mark levels, note the market state, and re-read the no-trade rules.
2. State the maximum risk available for the day and the trade cap out loud or in writing.
3. During the session: log entries as they happen, including the reason and the rule that authorized it.
4. After the session: log results in R, tag each trade, and mark rule adherence yes or no.
5. Write one sentence on execution quality, separate from whether the day was profitable.

Section 9 — Psychology protocols

Psychology rules belong in the plan as procedures, not as intentions. "Stay disciplined" is not actionable; "after two consecutive losses, stand up for ten minutes and re-read the entry checklist before the next trade" is.

• After a loss: a fixed cooling period before the next entry is permitted.
• After a large win: same size on the next trade, since size increases after wins are a common source of giveback.
• After a rule break: log it immediately, tag it, and stop trading for the day if it was a risk-rule break.
• When you feel urgency to "make it back", treat that feeling itself as a no-trade condition.
• When the plan and your opinion disagree, the plan wins for the current session and the disagreement goes into the review.

The point of a written protocol is that it is decided before emotion arrives. A post-loss protocol works because it is a rule you already agreed to, not a judgment call made while the account is red.

Section 10 — Review and change control

• Plan version number and the date it took effect.
• What evidence would justify changing a rule, defined in advance.
• The minimum sample of trades required before judging a change.
• A rule that only one variable changes per version, so the effect can be attributed.
• A log of previous versions and the reason each change was made.

Day trading plan example

Here is the template filled in for a single intraday strategy. It is an illustration of the level of specificity to aim for, not a recommendation to trade these rules.

• Instruments: two index futures contracts only; nothing else, regardless of how it is moving.
• Session: first two hours after the open; no new entries after that; all positions flat by the close.
• Context: the first thirty minutes establish a range; the strategy trades only the first clean break of that range.
• Trigger: a five-minute close beyond the range boundary, with entry on the retest of that boundary.
• Invalidation: the mid-point of the opening range; that distance defines 1R.
• Risk: 0.5% of equity per trade; maximum one position open at a time.
• Target: 2R, with an optional partial at 1R after which the stop moves to entry.
• Time stop: exit if the trade has not reached 1R within forty-five minutes.
• Daily limits: maximum two losses, maximum three trades, hard stop at −2R for the day.
• No-trade: no entry within ten minutes of a scheduled high-impact release; no second attempt after a failed break unless a new range forms.

Notice what the example does not contain: no profit target for the day, no discretionary "if it looks strong" clause, and no permission to add size after a win. Every line can be answered yes or no while the market is moving.

A swing trading variation

The same ten sections work for slower styles; only the parameters change. Sessions become a scheduled review time rather than live screen hours, the time stop is measured in days, and the daily loss limit becomes a weekly open-risk cap.

• Review window: a fixed thirty minutes after the close, when orders for the next day are placed.
• Maximum simultaneous positions and a cap on positions sharing one theme or sector.
• Overnight and gap risk stated explicitly, including whether stops are held on the exchange.
• Time stop expressed in trading days rather than minutes.
• Rules for what happens to open positions during scheduled events such as earnings.

Turning the plan into a pre-trade checklist

A full plan is too long to read before every entry. Compress it into a checklist of six to eight yes-or-no questions kept visible on the desk. If any answer is no, the trade does not happen.

1. Is this instrument on my list and inside my session window?
2. Is the required context present, and is the level one I marked in advance?
3. Has the trigger actually occurred, or am I anticipating it?
4. Do I know the invalidation price and the resulting position size?
5. Am I inside my daily loss limit and trade count?
6. Is this an authorized setup, or am I reaching because nothing has appeared today?
7. Would I be comfortable showing this entry in my review on Sunday?

Review cadence: daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly

A plan decays if it is never compared with results. Use four different review horizons, because each answers a question the others cannot.

• Daily, five minutes: were all trades authorized by the plan, and was any rule broken?
• Weekly, thirty minutes: total R, adherence rate, the cost of rule breaks, and one process fix for next week.
• Monthly: performance by setup tag, session, and day of week, plus whether expectancy is rising or falling.
• Quarterly: whether the plan version should change at all, based on a sample large enough to mean something.

The weekly trade review is the anchor of this cadence, and setup tags are what make the monthly view possible. Before rewriting rules based on a bad month, check whether the sample is large enough to distinguish variance from decay — the guide on how many trades are needed to test a strategy covers the arithmetic.

Measuring whether the plan is working

Judge a plan on two separate axes, and keep them separate. Adherence measures whether you followed it. Performance measures whether the rules had an edge. Mixing them leads traders to abandon good rules after a normal losing stretch and to keep bad ones after a lucky month.

• Adherence rate: the percentage of trades that were fully authorized by the plan.
• Cost of rule breaks: the total R lost specifically on unauthorized trades.
• Expectancy per setup tag once the sample is meaningful.
• Profit factor and maximum drawdown across the current plan version.
• Trade count against the planned cap, which exposes drift before P&L does.

Common mistakes when writing a trading plan

• Writing rules so vague that any chart can satisfy them.
• Producing twelve pages that are never read during a session.
• Copying another trader’s plan without matching it to your available screen time.
• Setting a daily loss limit but no action for reaching it.
• Changing several rules at once after one bad week.
• Leaving the plan in a file you never open, rather than beside the platform.
• Omitting no-trade conditions entirely, which is where most avoidable losses live.
• Treating the plan as permanent and never scheduling a review.

How Traderizz supports a written plan

A plan needs a place to live and a record to check it against. In Traderizz you can keep one journal per strategy with its rules written in the journal description, so the plan sits next to the trades it governs rather than in a forgotten document.

Logging results in R, tagging each trade with its setup, and marking rule adherence turns the daily and weekly reviews above into a few minutes of reading rather than a reconstruction exercise. Day views, the calendar, and the annual P&L heatmap make it straightforward to spot the session, weekday, or setup that keeps breaking a rule.

If you trade on a supported broker such as Delta Exchange India, importing fills keeps the history complete, which matters because adherence statistics are meaningless when the trades you would rather forget are missing from the record.

Write the first version today and keep it short. A one-page plan you follow for forty trades will teach you more about your process than a detailed document you never open, and it gives you something specific to improve at the next review.