How To Write A Trading Plan: An 11-Step Guide

A trading plan is an essential tool for any trader. It can help you stay focused and ensure that you are making the most of your trading opportunities. In this article, we will provide you with a 11-step guide on how to write a trading plan.

What do you want to achieve with your trading? Are you looking to maximize profits, reduce risk, or both? Once you know what you’re after, it’s easier to create a plan that targets those objectives.

How much profit will you seek when starting out? How and when does that number increase? What will your starting balance be?

Make sure your goals are measurable, set time frames. Assign how much time you want to put into actively trading. Add milestones for short, medium, and long-term achievements.

Understanding risk tolerance is an important part of writing a trading plan. Everyone has a different risk tolerance, it’s important to account for that when setting goals for your trading.

Some people are comfortable with taking on more risk than others. Some may only be willing to trade small amounts of money. It’s important to find out what level of risk your own tolerance is before starting a trading plan.

Once you know your risk tolerance, match your strategy and risk management techniques.

When writing a trading plan, it is important to assign risk limits to each trade. This will help you stay within your intended risk parameters. It prevents you from becoming overexposed to a particular market movement.

Whether you’re starting out, or been trading for a while, your trading plan should contain a rule for the percentage of risk allowed. You need to apply that percentage for each and every trade.

Whatever that number is, it should fit your profile. Write it down and follow it every time you sit down to trade.

Let’s take a look at an example:
I have $5,000 in my trading account trading on the NQ and each tick is $5
The % of risk I’m happy with, in this case is 3% per trade
3% of my account allows me to trade $150 of risk
$150 divided by $5 per trade, meaning I can risk 30 ticks.

So, what happens when the market is volatile and the number of ticks for each set up is 200. According to my risk allowance, I can’t trade these conditions as it exceeds my allowed risk. In this instance my risk would be 200 ticks x $5 which is $1,000.

I have 2 choices now. 1. I can sit the session out and wait for the markets to cool off a bit. or 2. because I’m trading Futures, I can drop down to a micro market where the value of a tick is smaller.

Your maximum allowed risk will be relative to your risk tolerance. I would suggest no more than 2-3% risk per trade.

Before you can write a trading plan, you need to first assess your skill level. This is important because the success of your trading will depend on your ability to execute trades.

You can use many tools to assess your skill level, like technical analysis on a simulated account. Once you understand your abilities and limitations, develop a trading plan to help you achieve your financial goals.

You’ll need to do some research before choosing the type of trading you want to do, and the product/market. You need to find a market that is likely to produce profitable returns for you. It should fall in line with your risk and skill assessments.

There are many markets out there, so it is important that you find one that is right for your investment goals, and risk tolerance.

Personally, I like Futures trading. The futures markets allow me to access the markets directly. I can trade a variety of assets, and trade leveraged products.

Once you have identified the market that you want to trade, the next step is to select a strategy.

There is no one-size-fits-all trading strategy. There are many successful day trading strategies out there. The one that works for you, will depend on your investment goals and risk tolerance.

That said, there are a few key steps you can take to develop a successful trading strategy. First, consider your investment goals, (you identified these in step 1). Are you looking to make short-term profits or are you hoping to achieve long-term growth?

There are 4 main types of trading:

1. Scalping (open trades for seconds to minutes)
2. Day Trading (open for minutes to an hour or 2)
3. Swing Trading (open for days, weeks, or months)
4. Long-term investing (1 year+)

You need to also consider your risk tolerance (you identified this in step 2). Are you comfortable with the potential for losses? What size losses are acceptable?

Taking this into account, you will be able to filter markets down to those appropriate.

If you are looking to day trade, you will need to learn how to read candlestick charts. These types of charts are among the most used tools in trading. Along with trading indicators they allow traders to perform technical analysis. This is how traders find good trades.

Technical analysis will not only allow you to find trades, it will help you set targets and exit points.

If you want to start trading, you will need to understand technical analysis. Consider studying an existing trading strategy rather than building your own. A consistent strategy, focused on limiting loss and maximising profit, is one you might want to learn to trade.

One of the most important things you can do to improve your trading is to have rules for when and how you enter trades. This will help you to stay disciplined and reduce the risk of making mistakes.

Have a pre-trade check-list. If a trade doesn’t meet all these checks, then don’t take the trade.

First, can I identify a pattern with a high probability of being profitable?
Do I have confirmation of that pattern?
Can I set my stop at the last failure point without risking more than I am allowed?
What is the volatility/ PVI at the time of the trade what’s the likelihood to pay a defined target?
Is the market too volatile for me to be trading right now?

These are some of the things that you can consider.

One of the most important aspects of trading is having rules for when and how to exit a trade. This allows you to maintain discipline and avoid emotional trading decisions.

There are many factors to consider when making these decisions. They include, the size of your position, the market conditions at the time, and your risk tolerance.

Every trade you place should have a stop loss which exits a trade when price reaches a given point. Your technical analysis will provide a price that indicates when a trade breaks down. This means the trade won’t be profitable, so to limit losses, you exit.

Your stop losses are per your risk tolerance and maximum allowable drawdown.

Your technical analysis will also tell you where the trade’s target is. Most traders set the profit target when placing the trade.

A trading journal is the best way to record and review every trade that you place.

Reviewing your trading journal can help you identify any errors that you might be making. In hindsight, you’ll be able to look at your trades with a logical frame of mind. This will help you better dissect your trades.

There are several things that you should record in your journal to take full advantage of it, let’s break them down.

First you need to note the market that you are trading, and what the market conditions are like. You could also note how confident you were feeling about trading these conditions.

Traders analyse their trading performance to improve their skills.

Your trading journal will be able to note targets for the session and whether you reached them, and why or why not. You need to not only understand how your performing, but also why you’re performing that way.

Without analysis you won’t be able to improve your trading, because you won’t know what needs changing.

An important thing to note when analysing performance: You want to know if you are profitable or not. But, that’s not the full story. You should measure your performance on how well you follow your plan.

If you follow your plan but have a loss from time to time, that’s fine. If you follow your plan exactly and have many losses, you may need to revise your plan.

Essential Steps in Your Aftermarket Routine

The trading day doesn’t end when the markets close—your growth as a trader continues long after. Building a structured aftermarket routine will help you turn every session into a learning opportunity.

Start by reviewing your trades for the day. Use your trading journal to document not just the trades themselves, but also your reasoning and emotional state during each one. Take screenshots of your charts at entry and exit; these visual records will be invaluable when looking back to spot recurring patterns or mistakes.

It’s a great idea to grade each trade according to your plan criteria. Did you follow your rules? Were your entries and exits disciplined? Add these grades and any relevant notes into your journal and analytics spreadsheet (Excel, Google Sheets—pick your favourite tool).

Next up, make a brief note on the overall market conditions. Did anything unusual happen that impacted your session? Was the volatility outside your comfort zone, or did you adjust smoothly?

Finally, remember to look after your mindset. Trading can be a psychological rollercoaster. Incorporate stress relief into your routine: a short session of meditation, a brisk walk, or a quick workout can help you decompress and approach the next day with renewed focus.

Consistency with your aftermarket routine not only polishes your technical skills but also strengthens your trading psychology—a double win for your ongoing development.

Monthly Trading Business Review

At the end of each month, set aside time to evaluate your trading business with a critical eye. This routine check-in helps you maintain discipline, spot areas for improvement, and ensure you’re on track with your trading goals.

Here are some practical steps you can follow:

• Review your key trading metrics. Go through your trading journal and analyse win rates, risk-reward ratios, average profit and loss per trade, and total performance. Look for patterns or any consistent mistakes that need attention.
• Evaluate your current strategies. Ask yourself—are your setups delivering the results you expect, or is it time to tweak or retire some approaches? Use concrete data from your journal rather than gut feeling.
• Back up all records. Safeguard your trading data, charts, and journal entries. Mistakes happen—don’t let a computer crash erase valuable insights.
• Assess risk management practices. Double-check that your position sizing and maximum loss limits align with your account balance and risk tolerance. Make adjustments if recent trades have shifted those boundaries.
• Set clear goals for next month. Outline specific, measurable targets, such as improving your discipline, tightening risk management, or trialling a new setup, so you always have a focus for your next cycle.

Set yourself timeframes for what you should review your plan. This will help you in measuring how well your plan works, and if you need to change anything.

Other reasons to revise your plan:

• Drastic change in market conditions
• Change in trading session
• Change in market traded
• Increased or Decreased account size
• Remove setups that don’t work
• Changes in life goals
• Lifestyle changes that affect your plan

Review Your Plan With an Accountability Partner

Another valuable strategy is sharing your trading plan with an accountability partner. When you feel stuck or notice recurring struggles, reviewing your plan together can be an eye-opener. Often, consistent trading issues trace back to not following specific rules you’ve set for yourself—and it’s surprisingly easy to overlook these when you’re on your own.

Having someone else look over your trades and your plan adds an extra layer of honesty. Choose someone who you trust and who isn’t afraid to give you honest feedback. This process helps ensure you’re not subconsciously bending your own rules or glossing over mistakes. Regular, transparent check-ins keep you focused on sticking to your process and make it much harder to ignore discipline lapses.

By making this part of your routine, you’ll quickly spot patterns, reinforce good habits, and address areas that need improvement. It’s not just about staying accountable—it’s about fast-tracking your personal growth as a trader.

To break bad trading habits, you need to view success and failure in a different way. A success isn’t whether you had a profitable trade. A failure isn’t when you have a losing trade.

You should measure success and failure by whether you followed your plan.

Did I make an undisciplined trade? That’s a failure. You can’t reinforce poor discipline by congratulating yourself, should that trade be a winner.

If I have a losing trade but follow my plan exactly, that’s a success. Hard luck, move on, the market doesn’t move the way it should 100% of the time.

Reward yourself when you do follow your trading plan, regardless of the outcome. Praise yourself, pat yourself on the back. This was a win; you did good today.

Regardless of whether you win or lose, if you followed your plan, you did the right thing, be proud.

The Importance of Accountability

Whenever you find yourself struggling with your trades, take a step back and look at your trade plan. Nine times out of ten, struggles can be traced back to breaking a rule—or several rules—you’ve set for yourself. Reviewing your trade plan honestly is non-negotiable if you want to improve.

One powerful way to stay on track is to review your trading with an accountability partner. Choose someone you trust and can be completely transparent with. If you aren’t honest with them (or yourself), you’re only cheating your own progress. Sometimes, having someone else look at your plan and your actual trades can highlight patterns you might miss on your own.

Staying disciplined, tracking your adherence, and using honest feedback—both from yourself and a partner—are key to long-term improvement.

Most often you shouldn’t alter your trading plan. There are a few situations where you do want to review your trading plan.

Review the plan if normal market conditions have changed and your plan stops working. You may have created your trading plan for a specific type of market. If that changes, look to see how you can alter your plan to accommodate.

If you have grown your account to a size outlined in your goals, you may want to review. Now that your account is larger it might be appropriate to revisit the size of your trades. The opposite is also true for losses. If your account has decreased you might want to consider reducing position size.

You may choose to revise what market you trade and at what time. You might consider adding or removing trade setups, or how you find trades. If you do this, make sure you back-test on a simulated trading account.

Your revision could be as simple as grading your plan every 6-12 months. While you should always trade your plan, there are times where you may need to tweak.

Monthly Routine for Trading Success

A solid monthly routine is essential to keep your trading sharp and your plan working for you—not against you.

Each month, carve out time to step back and take a wide-angle look at your entire trading approach. This means more than glancing over your latest wins and losses. Treat it like a mini “board meeting” with yourself.

Here’s what should be on your checklist:

• Deep-dive your trade analytics: Sift through your journal and identify any patterns. Did a particular setup outperform? Are your risk-to-reward ratios holding up? See where you stuck to your plan and where you drifted.
• Tweak your strategies: If you spot consistent weaknesses, don’t hesitate to make small adjustments. Just remember—only tweak one thing at a time, and always test changes in a simulated account first.
• Back everything up: It’s easy to forget, but losing your trade data to a computer crash or accidental deletion is a trader’s nightmare. Regularly back up your journal and trade records to the cloud or an external drive.
• Review risk management: As your account ebbs and flows, your position sizing and risk controls should adapt accordingly. Ensure you’re protecting yourself from outsized losses.
• Set monthly goals: Jot down a few clear, realistic targets you want to hit in the coming month—this could be anything from maintaining drawdown discipline, avoiding revenge trades, or simply following your plan 95% of the time.

By making these steps part of your regular monthly calendar, you’ll set yourself up for continuous improvement—and stay ahead of the curve as markets evolve.

Now that you know what goes into a trading plan, let’s put together an example.

My reason for trading is:
I want to build my account to a point where I can derive a regular income.

My goals are:
I plan to start with a simulated trading account, and trade a live account after 6 months practice. I will only do this if I have proven myself profitable on a consistent basis.

I will start with a small account looking to double the account within 18 months of trading.
I will increase my position sizes if I can double my account and remain consistent.

My risk tolerance is:
I am moderately conservative. I am seeking higher than average returns and I am happy to assume a small to medium amount of risk.

I’m looking to trade a somewhat volatile market to take advantage of larger targets. I will do this while maintaining reasonable risk management constraints.

My risk limitations are:
My maximum allowed risk per trade is 2% of my total trading account size. I will only place 2 trades per session. My daily maximum drawdown is 4%

My profit target is roughly 1.5 to 2 times the amount of risk in the trade.

My skill level:
I’m new to trading, and have a basic knowledge of trade setups. I am currently trading 2 setups until I become proficient.

I will be practising these skills on a simulated account until I am consistent. Once my skills are at an acceptable level, I will begin trading a live account.

My market to trade:
I have chosen to trade futures; this will allow me to use level for larger gains. I need to ensure that I manage my risk well to avoid larger losses. I chose the futures markets so that I can take advantage of a smaller account requirement. Check out my article on Options vs Futures for more information.

I will begin trading the Micro E-mini NASDAQ. I will trade in the Asian session to begin with.

My trading strategy:
I plan to day trade. I want to do this for around 90 minutes per day. I am seeking short-term gains.

I have 2 setups in my trading plan:
Simple support and resistance in trending channels
ABC patterns

My strategy tells me that my risk is place just beyond the failure point of these patterns. If the failure point is too far away or takes too much risk, I don’t trade.

My trade entry rules:
I will only place a trade if it matches my patterns and fits inside my allowed risk.

I will set my risk to reward between 1:1.5 and 1:2 to help in keeping my winners bigger than my losers. For each dollar of risk, my profit target will be $1.50 to $2.

If I’m not confident in where these exit points are, I won’t trade.

I can’t trade if I have already placed 2 trades, hit my max drawdown, or hit my target for the day.

My trade exit rules:
I will place a stop loss and take profit on my trade when I execute. I won’t move my stop further from my entry. I may choose to move my stop closer to my target it I become profitable.

Using my trading journal:
My trading plan states that I must use my trading plan every time I trade. I will enter the key statistics of all trades. I will also include screenshots and review my mindset.

Tracking goals and progress:

Reflecting on why I started trading in the first place is important—it’s easy to lose sight of my goals amid the daily noise. To stay motivated, I keep track of my goals and achievements directly in my trade plan. Recording specific milestones, like zero random trades for a week, an average trade score goal for the month, or even celebrating my first $1,000 net day, helps to visualize my progress and keeps me encouraged as I move forward.

Analysing performance:
I will review my trades each day and do a full review for the week on Fridays. My analysis will focus on whether I followed my trading plan, and if the strategy is working when I do so.

Establishing a solid routine

To keep myself on track and continually improve, I outline the specific tasks I perform before and after trading each day:

• Review my trading plan prior to the session
• Read through the previous day’s trade journal
• Go over my personal journal entries and reflect on recent experiences
• Check the day’s economic calendar for any major events
• Perform a pre-market analysis to identify key levels and setups

Visualization and mindset

Before the market opens, I take a few moments to visualize executing my trades according to my plan. I remind myself that outcomes are uncertain, and I accept the possibility of losses as part of the process. Sometimes I’ll use mantras like, “I accept that I have no idea what the outcome of any individual trade will be,” to reinforce discipline and keep emotions in check.

Aftermarket reflection
When the trading day wraps up, my work isn’t finished. I take the time to:

• Complete a scorecard for each trade
• Make a journal entry about the day’s market conditions and my execution
• Input trades into my tracking spreadsheet for analysis
• Take screenshots of my trades for future reference
• Dedicate a few minutes to stress relief, whether it’s a short meditation or a workout

Trading can be emotionally taxing, so maintaining mental fitness is just as important as reviewing my trades. These routines help me stay focused, learn from my mistakes, and keep improving.

Revising my trading plan:
I will review my trading plan every 6 months. Each 6 months I will consider if I increase my position sizes when trading. I will also consider a review if my performance is either positive or negative on a consistent basis.

In addition, at the end of each month, I dedicate time to a more thorough review of my trading business. This means:

• Analysing trade analytics and making any necessary adjustments to my strategies
• Backing up all trading data and notes
• Double-checking my risk management approach and position sizing
• Writing out my main goals for the coming month

This layered approach—daily, weekly, and monthly—helps keep my trading process sharp, adaptive, and focused on continuous improvement.

Keeping mentally fit:
Trading isn’t just about numbers and charts—it can be emotionally draining, too. There are days you’ll do everything right and still end up with less money than you started. That’s why I include stress-relieving activities in my aftermarket routine: meditating, going for a run, or just stepping away from the screens for a bit. Staying mentally fit is just as important as sticking to the trading plan.

Now you know what to put in your trading plan, you can write your own. To get you started you can download this trading plan template. This will help you note down everything you need for setting your trading plan.