Building a trading plan

What it is

A trading plan is your rulebook: which markets and sessions you trade, your setups and their exact entry, stop and target rules, your risk per trade, your daily loss limit, and when you stop for the day.

Its job is to make decisions before you're in a trade, when you're calm, so you're only following rules in the moment.

How to spot it

• If you can't explain why you took a trade in one sentence, it probably wasn't in the plan.
• A good plan is short enough to check before every trade.

How to use it

• Turn each setup into a checklist. In UNFLD, a strategy's rules become a checklist in the journal, and ticking them all marks the trade as following your rules.
• Review the plan weekly with your journal, and change it then, not mid-session.

Common mistakes

• Having a plan you don't actually follow.
• Changing the rules after every loss.

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