How to Write a Trading Plan You Can Actually Follow
The five questions a trading plan must answer, plus the review routine that keeps it honest.
A trading plan is not a document about markets. It is a document about your behaviour: what you will do, when, how much, and when you stop.
Plans fail for two reasons — they are too long to consult, or too vague to check. A usable plan fits on one page and can be answered yes or no in real time.
The five questions
Every functional plan answers the same five questions. Anything beyond them is optional detail that should earn its place.
- What do I trade? Specific instruments and timeframes.
- When do I act? The condition and the trigger, written as checkable statements.
- Where is the idea wrong? The invalidation price and how it is set.
- How much do I risk? A fixed percentage and the sizing method.
- When do I stop? Daily loss limit, trade count limit, session end.
Conditions versus triggers
A condition describes the market state you require — for example, a defined higher-timeframe structure and a specific level being tested. A trigger is the event that starts the trade. Separating them prevents the most common plan violation: acting on a trigger with no condition.
Making rules checkable
Replace adjectives with measurements. 'Strong move' becomes a range or candle-count criterion. 'Near the level' becomes a distance. Rules you cannot check cannot be reviewed, and rules you cannot review never improve.
The review loop
A weekly review counts setups that matched, trades taken, trades taken that did not match, and rule breaks. It ends with exactly one change. One change per week is slow, cumulative and far more durable than a monthly rewrite.
For the full system, the ZoneEdu library book The Trading Journal Method sets out the capture fields and review sheets in detail.