How to Write a Trading Plan (Free Template You'll Actually Use)

Most trading plans die the same way. You write two pages of principles on a Sunday, feel organized, and never open the file again, because nothing in it tells you what to do at 9:47am when a stock is 3% off its high and your cursor is over the buy button. A plan that survives contact with a live session reads more like a checklist than a philosophy: rules specific enough that a stranger could follow them and take the same trade you would, plus the numbers that decide when you stop for the day. Below is that structure, a filled-in example with real prices so you can see what specific looks like, and both halves as copy-paste text you can drop into a spreadsheet in about a minute.

Quick Answer

Is a Trading Plan the Same as a Trading Strategy?

No, and conflating them is the most common reason a written plan does nothing. The plan is the business. The strategy is one product that business sells. Your plan holds everything that stays true across every trade you will ever take: how much you risk, which markets you are allowed in, what stops the day, when you review. A strategy is the entry-and-exit mechanism for one specific pattern. You get exactly one plan and as many strategies as you can genuinely name.

Both halves fail in their own way when they go missing. A document that is only a strategy gives you a crisp bull flag entry rule and no answer for what happens on the fourth losing trade. A document that is only a plan gives you goals, market hours, and mindset language, and leaves you deciding entries by feel. CME Institute makes the same split in its course on building a trade plan, where the strategy is treated as a component slotted into the plan rather than as the plan itself. If your strategy half is thin, the catalogue of day trading strategies is a better place to build it than this post, and the momentum playbook is the one most people write down first.

Read that middle column top to bottom and the pattern is hard to miss. Plan rows are the ones that decide how long you get to keep playing. Strategy rows decide how well you play. People spend nine tenths of their effort on the second group, which is why so many traders have a beautiful entry technique and a blown account.

The Eight Sections a Trading Plan Needs

Here is the whole trading plan checklist. The right column matters more than the left one, because almost everybody can list section headings and almost nobody writes rules crisp enough to act on. A section is not done because there is text under it. It is done when the text answers the question without you having to interpret yourself at speed.

Two of those deserve a note before you fill them in. Section 2 is where the will-not-trade list does the heavy lifting, because a plan that only says what you trade leaves every unlisted thing quietly permitted, and the unlisted thing is always the one gapping 40% on a headline at 9:31am. Section 5 is where most templates go soft: a stop with no target is a plan for getting out badly, and a target with no stop is not a plan at all. Both go in as prices, before entry, and the stop comes from the chart rather than from your comfort level. The reasoning for putting it under structure is spelled out in the piece on where a stop actually belongs on the chart.

Rather than retyping all of that, take the block below. Select it, paste it into cell A1 of a blank Google Sheet or Excel workbook, and both apps split it on the tabs into a two-column layout: section labels down the left, your rules down the right. The same block pastes into Notion as a table and into a Word or Google Doc as a rough two-column list.

Section	Your rule
1. Goal (process)	
1. Goal (money guardrail)	
1. Why I am doing this	
2. Markets I trade	
2. Markets I will not trade	
2. Minimum liquidity filter	
3. Setup A (name)	
3. Setup B (name)	
3. Everything else	Skip
4. Entry trigger	
4. Entry invalidated if	
5. Stop placement rule	
5. First target (T1)	
5. Second target (T2)	
5. After T1 I do this	
6. Risk per trade %	
6. Position size formula	
6. Minimum reward-to-risk	
6. Daily loss cap	
6. Max losses per day	
7. Pre-market routine	
7. No-trade windows	
7. End-of-day routine	
8. Weekly review	
8. Monthly review	
8. What would change this plan	

If the whole thing lands in a single column, your clipboard ate the tabs on the way over. Data, then Split text to columns, fixes it. Then fill the right-hand column in your own words, and be suspicious of any row you can complete in three words. "Good setups only" is not a rule. "Bull flag on a stock with relative volume above 2, or a VWAP reclaim after a morning washout, and nothing else" is.

How Much Do You Risk, and What Stops the Day?

One percent of the account per trade is the number you will see quoted most, and it is a convention rather than a law. On a $3,000 account, 1% is $30, which on some setups barely clears the spread, so people quietly creep upward and stop having a rule at all. What matters more than the specific percentage is that it gets fixed before you look at a chart, because a number chosen while you are staring at a setup you like has stopped being a limit and started being a rationalization.

Position size falls out of that number and two prices. Shares equals your risk dollars divided by the distance from entry to stop, which means the stop location determines the size rather than the other way round. Widen the stop and you buy fewer shares. That relationship is the whole point, and it is the one people invert when they decide the size first and then hunt for a stop that fits. The longer version of the arithmetic, including what to do when the answer comes back as 11 shares, is in the walkthrough on sizing a position from risk per trade.

Your minimum reward-to-risk goes in as a hard number so that setups can fail it. For reference, these are the thresholds SnapPChart applies when it grades a chart: 1.5:1 for scalps, 2:1 for day trades, 3:1 for swings, and an extra 0.5 added on top for any forex pair so the trade still lands near its target ratio after the spread. You do not have to adopt those, but they are a defensible starting point, and the reason a higher bar is not automatically better is the breakeven win rate your ratio implies climbing right alongside it.

Then the rule that most plans skip and most blown days needed: a daily loss cap. Write two of them, because they catch different failures. A dollar or percent cap catches the day where one oversized position runs away from you. A maximum number of losing trades catches the day where the market simply is not offering your setup and you keep paying to find out. Prop firm traders get this enforced on them from the outside, and it is worth reading how that changes decision-making even if nobody is enforcing it on you: the piece on trading against a shrinking daily loss limit is the closest thing to a stress test for this rule.

Those four numbers are arithmetic, so put them in a sheet rather than in a document. Paste the block below into A1 of a second tab. Labels land in column A, values and formulas in column B, and the four calculated rows maintain themselves from then on. Format the two percent rows as percentages, or type them as decimals the way they appear here.

Account size	8000
Risk per trade %	0.01
Max risk per trade $	=B1*B2
Entry price	
Stop price	
Target price	
Position size (shares)	=IFERROR(ROUNDDOWN(B3/ABS(B4-B5),0),"")
Planned R:R	=IFERROR(ABS(B6-B4)/ABS(B4-B5),"")
Daily loss cap %	0.02
Daily loss cap $	=B1*B9
P&L so far today	
Keep trading?	=IF(B11<=-B10,"STOP FOR THE DAY","OK")

Four things now compute themselves. B3 is the most you can lose on one trade. B7 is the share count, rounded down so you never quietly exceed the cap. B8 is the planned reward-to-risk, visible while you are still deciding rather than after the fact. B12 turns your daily cap into an instruction instead of an intention. Trading forex swaps one row: replace the share formula with =B3/(stop_in_pips*pip_value_per_lot) to get size in lots, and if pip value is not yet second nature, the explainer on what a pip actually measures is the prerequisite.

A Trading Plan Example, Filled In

Blank field labels are easy to nod along to and hard to copy. Here is the same eight sections filled in for an illustrative trader running an $8,000 cash account and day trading US equities. The numbers are made up for teaching purposes, but they are internally consistent, which is the part that matters when you check your own against them.

• 1. Goals
  Take only setups I graded B+ or better, and log every one including the skips. Forty trades a month, no more. Money guardrail rather than a target: if the account is down 6% in a calendar month, I size down by half until it recovers. Why: I want a second income that does not depend on my employer, and I want to find out in two years whether I am any good at this.
• 2. Markets
  US equities between $2 and $40, average daily volume above 1M shares, relative volume above 2 at the moment I look. Will not trade: anything under 1M average volume, biotech on an FDA headline, the first five minutes after the open, earnings day on a name I do not follow, and any chart where I cannot name the setup.
• 3. Setups
  Two, both named. Setup A is a bull flag off the opening drive. Setup B is a VWAP reclaim after a morning washout. Everything else gets skipped and logged as a skip.
• 4. Entry
  Setup A triggers on a break of the flag high with the breakout candle printing volume above the previous five. Invalidated before entry if the flag makes a lower low, or if the break happens on volume lighter than the pullback that preceded it.
• 5. Exits
  Stop goes a few cents under the low of the consolidation, never at a round percentage. T1 at one full R, sell half. T2 at the prior day high or the next resistance shelf, whichever is nearer. After T1 fills, the stop moves to entry and the rest rides to T2 or gets stopped flat.
• 6. Risk
  1% per trade, which is $80. Minimum reward-to-risk of 2:1 measured to T2, and if the chart does not offer it I do not take it. Daily loss cap of 2%, which is $160 and happens to be exactly two full stops. Three losing trades in a session ends the day regardless of the dollar figure.
• 7. Routine
  8:45am scan, write three tickers and the level that matters on each onto paper. No trades between 9:30 and 9:35. No new entries after 11:30. 4:15pm, log the day including every setup I passed on.
• 8. Review
  Friday 4:30pm, thirty minutes, plan open next to the trade log. First Sunday of the month, ninety minutes on whether any rule needs changing. Rules change on review day only, never during a session.

Now watch that plan produce an actual trade. A $14 stock opens gapped up 9% on four times its usual volume, drives to $14.80 in the first twenty minutes, then pulls back and builds a tight flag between $14.55 and $14.72 while volume dries up. That is Setup A, so the plan is already doing its job by making the identification a yes or no question rather than a feeling.

Entry goes at $14.74, a couple of cents through the flag high. Stop goes at $14.51, under the flag low, which puts $0.23 of risk on each share. Size comes from the sheet: $80 divided by $0.23 is 347.8, rounded down to 347 shares, risking $79.81. T1 sits at $14.97, one full R above entry. T2 sits at the prior day high of $15.40, which is $0.66 of reward against $0.23 of risk, a planned ratio of 2.87:1. That clears the 2:1 minimum, so the trade is allowed. Had the prior day high been $15.10 instead, the ratio would come out at 1.57:1 and the correct answer is to log a skip and move on. That is the entire function of writing the number down in advance: it lets a good-looking chart lose.

What Changes for Forex, Day Trading, and Swing?

One plan with a market-specific block beats maintaining two documents, because the sections that keep you solvent do not care what you are trading. Risk percent, daily cap, review cadence, and the rules about your own behavior stay put. What changes is a short list, and it is worth being precise about it rather than writing a second plan from scratch. If you are still deciding which of these you are, the comparison of scalping against day trading against swing trading is the decision this table assumes you have already made.

The bottom row is a disclosure rather than a recommendation. SnapPChart clamps any non-stock instrument, forex pairs included, at a maximum grade of B, because the momentum scoring underneath it was built on small-cap stock behavior and would otherwise hand out confident A grades on the asset classes where that behavior transfers least. Worth knowing before you wonder why a clean-looking EUR/USD chart never scores above B.

One thing that belongs outside your plan entirely: account rules. How many day trades your broker permits, what equity you need for margin, and what happens if you cross a threshold are regulatory questions rather than strategy ones, and FINRA's day trading guidance is the source for them. The 2026 change to the pattern day trader threshold is covered in the breakdown of the new PDT rules. Your plan should reference the constraint, not restate it, because the rule can change under you and a stale copy in your own document is worse than no copy.

The Rules That Are About You, Not the Chart

Every section so far has been about markets. The sections that decide whether you follow any of it are about you, and they fail differently: they are the ones people write as aspirations. "I will stay disciplined" and "I will not chase" are not rules, because there is no moment at which you can check whether you obeyed them. Rewrite each one as a mechanical consequence with a trigger, and it starts working.

The mechanism these rules are fighting is worth understanding rather than just guarding against, because the loss that starts a spiral rarely feels like the problem at the time. The anatomy of that sequence, and why it accelerates rather than fading, is laid out in the piece on how one loss turns into six, and the broader set of biases that bend a plan mid-session is covered under trading psychology. Both are more useful before you write this section than after.

How Often Should You Review the Plan?

On four clocks, and they answer different questions. Daily takes five minutes after the close: for each trade, did it match a named setup, yes or no. Weekly takes thirty, with the plan open beside the log, reading your rules against what you actually did. Monthly is where you ask whether any rule needs changing, because a month is the shortest window where the answer is not just noise. Quarterly is for the goals section, which is the one that quietly goes stale while everything else stays current.

• Daily, 5 min
  Per trade, one question: did this match a named setup? Yes or no, no elaboration. Note the day's rule breaks while you still remember what you were thinking.
• Weekly, 30 min
  Read the plan next to the week's log. Every trade that broke a rule gets a line explaining which rule and what you were reacting to. Then pick one change to make and only one.
• Monthly, 90 min
  Does any rule need to change, and is there evidence for it beyond a bad week? Look at whether one setup is carrying the account and another is quietly draining it.
• Quarterly
  The goals section. Is the reason you wrote at the top still the reason you are doing this? If not, most of the rules underneath it are pointed at the wrong target.
• Never mid-session
  Rules change on review day and nowhere else. A rule loosened at 10:15am to accommodate the trade in front of you was not a rule.

None of that works without something to review against, which is the part of the plan that lives outside the document. A plan tells you what you meant to do and a trade log records what you did, and the gap between them is the only thing a review can actually examine. The companion sheet, with the exact columns and the formulas that fill six of them, is in the journal template post, and the argument over which fields earn their place is in the shorter piece on which journal metrics are worth the typing. One field matters more than the rest here: a grade recorded before the outcome exists, because it turns your weekly review into a comparison of predictions against results rather than a reread of notes written after you already knew how it ended. Investopedia's piece on building a trading plan makes the same point about record-keeping being the half that turns a plan into feedback.

You can grade setups yourself against the checklist you just wrote, and a lot of people do exactly that with good results. The reason an outside read helps is consistency, because your own bar drops quietly at 11:15 on a slow morning when nothing has set up yet. SnapPChart reads a chart screenshot and scores the structure against fixed technical criteria, returning a letter grade with an entry, a stop, and the case against the trade. The boundary is worth stating plainly, since this category is full of vague claims: it does not read your plan, store your rules, remember what you wrote last month, or know whether you took the trade. It looks at one static chart. The mechanics of that read are covered under AI chart analysis, and the broader question of what this class of tool can and cannot see is in the overview of how AI tools analyze charts. Your plan stays a discipline exercise. The grade is a second opinion at the moment your plan tells you to look twice.