If your trading plan is three pages long, you have never read it during a session. That is the only test that matters — a plan is a tool for the worst ten minutes of your week, not a document about your ambitions.
Everything you need fits on one page, and it fits in six lines.
The six lines
- Instruments — the two or three you genuinely know. Not a watchlist of twenty.
- Hours — the specific window you trade, and when you are closed.
- Setup — the conditions that must all be true before you enter.
- Risk per trade — one number, in percent.
- Shutdown — the loss or trade count that ends the day.
- Review — when you read your own journal, and what you look for.
A filled-in example
I trade EUR/USD and gold between 08:00 and 11:00 London. I enter only on a retest of a level marked before the open, stop beyond the level, minimum 2R target. I risk 0.5% per trade. I stop after two losses or 1.5% down on the day. I review every Sunday against my journal and change one variable a month.
That paragraph answers every question the session can ask. There is nothing left to decide at 10:47 while price is moving and judgement is at its worst.
The shutdown rule nobody writes
Plans specify entries in obsessive detail and stopping almost never. Yet accounts are rarely lost to the first bad trade — they are lost to the trades taken to fix it.
Make the shutdown mechanical and unarguable:
- Two full losses, or
- A fixed percentage down for the day, or
- A fixed number of trades taken
Then close the terminal. A day ended early costs a fraction of a broken drawdown rule.
Copy the firm''s numbers into the plan
Keep the rulebook figures on the page, not in your head, and translate each one into an action:
| Rule | Line in your plan |
|---|---|
| Daily loss limit | Personal daily stop set well inside it |
| Maximum drawdown | Risk per trade leaving 12+ full losses |
| Minimum trading days | A minimum number of sessions per week |
| Consistency rule | A cap on how much any one day may contribute |
| Exposure / margin rule | A cap on total open positions at once |
Your dashboard shows the live version of all of these, including today''s floor in dollars, so the plan and the account agree on the numbers.
Reviewing without rewriting
Review on a schedule, never after a loss. Weekly is enough. Ask two questions:
- Did I follow the plan?
- If yes, did the plan work?
Those are two entirely different problems with two entirely different fixes, and the page is the only thing that lets you tell them apart. Change one variable at a time, or you will never know which change did anything.
Next steps
Write your six lines today. Then read how to keep a trading journal for the record side, and how to build a trading plan for the longer walkthrough.
When the page holds up over twenty trades on demo, put it on a $5 evaluation — you pay the account fee only after you pass.