Education
Building a Trading Plan That Survives Contact with the Market
A template for a written plan you will actually use — entries, exits, risk, and the rules you break under pressure.
Most "trading plans" are aspirational documents that live in a Notion page no one opens. A real plan is short, specific, and used every session. It answers five questions in writing: what you trade, when you trade, why you enter, how you exit, and what stops you from trading.
What you trade. Pick a small universe. Three to five instruments is enough for ninety percent of profitable traders. Day traders might pick ES, NQ, and CL. Equities traders might pick a sector ETF and the top two or three names inside it. The point is repetition. You cannot build pattern recognition across forty tickers.
When you trade. Define your session in writing. "First ninety minutes after the open" is a real session. "Whenever I am at my desk" is not. Most retail traders are unprofitable because they trade through chop and overnight ranges where their edge does not exist. Cutting screen time often improves results.
Why you enter. Each setup needs a name, a trigger, a context filter, and an invalidation. "Opening drive long" with trigger "break of opening range high after a positive overnight session" and invalidation "trade back below VWAP within five minutes" is a real setup. "Looks good" is not. If you cannot describe a setup to another trader in two sentences, you cannot consistently execute it.
How you exit. Define stop loss, profit targets, and trail rules before entry. Decide in advance how partials are taken — for example, half off at one R, move stop to breakeven, trail the rest behind a swing low. A plan without exit rules is a plan to freeze when price is moving against you.
What stops you from trading. List your hard rules: daily loss limit, max trades per day, max trades per setup, mandatory break after two consecutive losses. These are not suggestions. They are the guardrails that keep one bad hour from becoming a blown account.
Review weekly. Pull your trade log and tag each trade as "in plan" or "out of plan." Profitability of "in plan" trades is your real edge. "Out of plan" trades — even winning ones — are the leak. Most traders discover the leak is bigger than the edge.