Trading Psychology6 min read
How to Build a One-Page Trading Plan
Quick answer
Six lines that decide every trade before the market opens — and the shutdown rule most plans forget.
A trading plan is not a document about your ambitions; it is a set of decisions made in advance so that the market cannot make them for you. If it does not fit on one page, it will not survive a bad Tuesday.
The point of writing it down is that it lets you separate two very different failures: the plan was wrong, or you did not follow it. Without the page, every loss looks the same.
The six lines that matter
Everything else is commentary. Write these six and stop.
- Instruments — the two or three you actually know
- Hours — the specific window you trade, and when you are closed
- Setup — the conditions that must all be true to enter
- Risk per trade — one number, in percent
- Daily stop — the loss or number of trades that ends the day
- Review — when you read your own journal and what you look for
Worked 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, with the stop beyond the level and a minimum 2R target. I risk 0.5% per trade, stop after two losses or one 1.5% day, and review every Sunday against my journal."
That paragraph answers every in-session question in advance. There is nothing left to decide at 10:47 when price is moving and judgement is worst.
The shutdown rule most plans skip
Plans usually specify how to enter and rarely specify when to stop. The stop-trading condition is what protects the account, because losses do not arrive from the first bad trade but from the attempts to fix it.
Make it mechanical and unambiguous: two full losses, or a set percentage down, or a fixed number of trades. Then close the terminal. A locked-out day costs a fraction of a broken drawdown rule.
Adapting it to prop firm rules
Copy the firm's numbers into the plan rather than keeping them in your head. Your daily stop should sit clearly inside the daily loss limit, and your risk per trade should leave more than a dozen full losses against the maximum drawdown.
If there is a minimum trading-day requirement or a consistency rule, write the implication as a line you can obey — for example a cap on how much of your total profit any single day is allowed to contribute.
Frequently asked questions
How long should a trading plan be?
One page. Long plans are written to feel prepared and are never read during a session, which is the only time a plan is useful.
How often should I change it?
On a schedule, not after a loss. Review at a fixed interval — weekly or monthly — using your journal, and change one variable at a time so you can tell what the change did.
What belongs in the plan versus the journal?
The plan holds decisions made in advance: instruments, hours, setup, risk, stop conditions. The journal holds what actually happened, including whether you followed the plan. Comparing the two is where improvement comes from.
Related guides
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ReadTrading Discipline Routine
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ReadPosition Sizing
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ReadTrade it on a funded account
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