Vladimir Rybakov
Author
Snir Ahiel
Fact Checker
A trading plan is a written set of rules that decides, before the market opens, what you trade, when you enter and exit, how much you risk, when you stop, and how you review. It moves every decision out of the moment. A strategy tells you what a setup is; a plan tells you how you will behave around it.
Most traders have a strategy. Far fewer have a plan, and the difference shows up in the same place every time: the minutes after a loss, the hour after a big win, the slow afternoon when nothing is setting up. A strategy has nothing to say in those moments. A plan does, because it was written for them. As a prop trading firm, we can tell you that the evaluations that pass are rarely the ones with the best strategy. They are the ones where the trader did the same thing on day nineteen as on day one.
This page explains what a trading plan is and how it differs from a strategy, what it must contain, how to write one, a full worked example for a funded forex account, the rules that matter most when the capital is a firm's, and how to keep following the plan once the market starts testing it. It sits inside the broader frame our guide to the funded trader mindset describes, as the document that makes the mindset operational.
A trading plan is a written document that sets your rules for the whole trading process: which markets and sessions, which strategy and setups, how entries and exits are defined, how much is risked per trade and per day, when trading stops, and how results are reviewed. It is personal, specific and written before the session, in advance.
The word that matters in that definition is written. A plan that exists in a trader's head is a set of intentions, and intentions bend under pressure. A written plan is a contract with a calmer version of yourself, made at a time when no position is open and no loss is fresh. When the moment arrives, the decision has already been made.
A trading plan is not a trading strategy. A strategy defines a setup: the conditions under which you enter, where the stop goes, where the target is. "Buy a pullback to the 20-period average in an uptrend on the one-hour chart, stop below the swing low, target two times the risk" is a strategy. It says nothing about how many times a day you may take it, what you do after three losses, whether you trade during news, or when you review your results. Those are plan questions. A plan contains one or more strategies and wraps them in the rules that govern the trader.
A plan is not a checklist, and not a journal. The checklist is the short version of the plan you run before each trade to confirm the plan is being followed. The journal is the record of what happened, which feeds the review the plan schedules. Plan, checklist and journal are three documents with three jobs, and the plan is the one the other two depend on.
A complete trading plan covers nine areas: purpose and time, markets and sessions, strategy and setups, entry rules, exit rules, position size and risk, session limits (daily stop, weekly stop, trade cap, recovery window), routine, and review schedule. Most traders write the first six and skip the last three, which is where funded and personal accounts are usually lost.
The table below is the template. Every row is a question the plan must answer in writing; the right-hand column shows the kind of answer that counts as specific enough.
| Section | The question | What a specific answer looks like |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Purpose and time | Why am I trading, and how many hours a week can I give it? | "Building a second income over two years. Ninety minutes each weekday morning, London open." |
| 2. Markets and sessions | Which instruments, which hours, and which conditions do I avoid? | "EUR/USD and GBP/USD only. 07:00 to 10:30 London. No trades in the ten minutes around high-impact releases." |
| 3. Strategy and setups | What is the setup, in terms someone else could apply? | "Pullback to the 20 EMA in a one-hour trend, confirmed by a rejection candle on the 15-minute." |
| 4. Entry rules | What must be true before I click? | "All three conditions present. Reason line written. Size calculated. Stop and target placed with the order." |
| 5. Exit rules | Where is the stop, where is the target, and what moves them? | "Stop below the swing low. Target at 2R. Stop to breakeven at 1R. Never widened." |
| 6. Position size and risk | How much per trade, and how is it calculated? | "0.5% of account equity per trade. Lot size from stop distance, rounded down." |
| 7. Session limits | When do I stop, whatever I feel like? | "Daily stop 1.5%. Weekly stop 3%. Max three trades a day. Fifteen minutes away from the screen after any loss." |
| 8. Routine | What happens before the first trade and after the last? | "Pre-market: calendar, levels, bias, checklist. Post-market: journal every trade, tag any deviation." |
| 9. Review | When do I look at the results as a whole, and what can change? | "Weekly Friday review. Monthly deep review. Rules change only at the monthly review, never mid-week." |
How the plan changes by style. A day trading plan and a swing trading plan share the nine sections and differ in the numbers. The day trader's session limits are per day and the trade cap matters most; the swing trader's limits are per week and the exit rules matter most, because positions are held through periods the trader is not watching. A scalper's plan has a much higher trade cap and a much shorter recovery window, and leans hardest on the routine section, because fatigue is the scalper's main enemy. The sections do not change. The answers do.
Section 7 is the one most plans are missing. It is also the section that the two most common destructive behaviours are fixed by. Revenge trading is stopped by the recovery window and the daily stop; overtrading is stopped by the trade cap and the setup quality gate. A plan without session limits is a strategy with a preamble.
Write it in one sitting, in the order of the template, and answer each question with a number or a condition rather than an intention. Then test it for a fortnight without changing anything, journal every deviation, and revise at the first monthly review. A plan written in an evening and followed beats a perfect one never finished.
Step 1. Start with what you already do. Most traders who sit down to write a plan discover they already have one, in fragments: a strategy they trust, a size they usually use, a time of day they trade. Write those down first. The plan is the existing way of trading, made explicit and given limits.
Step 2. Turn every intention into a rule. "I will manage risk carefully" is an intention. "0.5% per trade, stop placed with the order, never widened" is a rule. The test is whether a stranger could read the line and tell, from your trade history, whether you followed it. If they could not, the line is not finished.
Step 3. Write the session limits before the entry rules. This is backwards from how most guides order it and it is deliberate. The entry rules are the part traders enjoy writing and the session limits are the part they skip. Do the daily stop, the weekly stop, the trade cap and the recovery window first, while the enthusiasm is there, and let the entry rules come after.
Step 4. Size the numbers to the account. Risk per trade is chosen so that a normal run of losses is survivable and does not provoke an emotional reaction. For most traders that is between 0.25% and 1% of equity. The daily stop is typically two to three planned losses; the weekly stop, roughly twice the daily. The trade cap comes from the strategy's setup frequency: if the strategy produces two or three valid setups a day, the cap is three, not ten. Our guide to forex risk management covers the arithmetic behind each of these, and our guide to position sizing turns risk per trade into a lot size.
Step 5. Run it unchanged for two weeks. The urge to tweak a plan after three days is strong and it should be resisted, because a plan that changes weekly never produces the evidence needed to judge it. Trade it as written, journal every deviation with the reason, and let the deviations accumulate. They are the most useful data the first month produces.
Step 6. Revise on a schedule. Rules change at the monthly review, on evidence, and nowhere else. If the journal shows the trade cap was broken eight times and the extra trades lost money, the cap stays and the trader adjusts. If it shows the cap was too tight for a strategy that produces five clean setups a day, the cap moves to five. Either way, the change is made on a Sunday with the data open, not on a Tuesday with a position open.
The minimum viable plan for a beginner. A first plan does not need all nine sections at full depth. It needs one market, one session, one strategy written as conditions, a fixed risk per trade, a daily stop, and a journal. Six lines. Everything else can be added at the first review, and a beginner who trades six written lines for a month is ahead of most traders who never write anything.
Below is a complete forex trading plan for a $100K funded evaluation, written for a trader with ninety minutes a day. Every rule is a number or a condition. The session limits are sized so the 12% maximum loss would take at least eight consecutive worst-case days to reach, and a normal losing run leaves most of the budget intact.
This example is written for a Pipcy Classic Two-Step $100K account, which has a 12% static maximum loss, a 12% Phase 1 target and 6% Phase 2 target, a 3-day minimum, no time limit and no daily drawdown. The numbers are one reasonable set, not the only one.
1. Purpose and time. Pass the evaluation, then build a payout record over the following six months. Ninety minutes a day, 07:00 to 08:30 London, Monday to Thursday. No trading Fridays.
2. Markets and sessions. EUR/USD and GBP/USD. Entries only inside the ninety-minute window. No new entries within ten minutes before or after a high-impact release on either currency, and no entries in the last fifteen minutes of the window.
3. Strategy. Trend-pullback. One-hour chart defines the trend (price above a rising 20 EMA for long, below a falling one for short). Fifteen-minute chart provides the entry: a pullback to the 20 EMA that prints a rejection candle closing back in the trend direction.
4. Entry rules. All three conditions present. One-line reason written before the order. Lot size calculated from the stop distance at 0.5% risk. Stop and target attached to the order. Limit orders only after any loss.
5. Exit rules. Stop below the rejection candle's extreme for longs, above it for shorts. Target at two times the stop distance. Stop moved to breakeven once price reaches one times the stop distance. Stops are never widened. Positions are closed at the end of the window if neither stop nor target has been hit.
6. Position size and risk. 0.5% of current equity per trade, recalculated each morning. On $100,000, that is $500 of risk per trade. With a 25-pip stop, that is 2 lots; the calculation is always rounded down.
7. Session limits. Daily stop: 1.5% (three full losses). Weekly stop: 3%. Maximum three trades a day. Fifteen minutes away from the screen after any loss, timer on. Size on the trade after a loss is capped at normal size, never raised. After the daily stop, the platform is closed and the session is journaled.
8. Routine. Pre-market: economic calendar checked, one-hour trend marked on both pairs, bias written, checklist read aloud. Post-market: every trade journaled with setup, reason, size, result in R, and a deviation tag if any rule was broken.
9. Review. Friday morning: the week's trades reviewed by rule adherence first, result second. Last Sunday of the month: full review, and the only time any number above may be changed.
What the numbers imply. At 0.5% risk, the 12% maximum loss is 24 planned losses deep, and the daily stop means a bad week costs at most 3%. On the profit side, if this strategy runs at a 45% win rate with a 2R payoff, its expectancy is +0.35R per trade, or about +0.175% of the account. Reaching the 12% Phase 1 target would then take roughly 69 trades, which at three a day is around 23 trading days; the 6% Phase 2 target, about half that. Those figures are a model with the stated assumptions, not a forecast, and a real strategy's win rate will vary week to week. The point of running them is not to predict the pass date but to check that the plan is coherent: the profit target is reachable at this risk level well before the loss budget could be exhausted, and there is no time limit forcing the pace.
On a funded account the plan must answer three questions a personal plan can skip: how risk per trade relates to the fixed maximum loss, how session limits substitute for rules the firm does not impose, and how pace relates to the target and payouts. On Pipcy the second matters most: no daily drawdown stops a bad day for you.
A personal account has no maximum loss written into a contract and no profit target with a payout behind it. A funded account has both, and they change what the plan's numbers mean.
Risk per trade as a fraction of the loss budget. The maximum loss is the plan's real account size. On a 12% static maximum, 1% risk per trade is a budget of twelve planned losses; 0.5% is twenty-four; 2% is six. Six losses is a normal fortnight for most strategies, which is why 2% is too much on an evaluation whatever it is on a personal account. The plan should state risk per trade and the number of consecutive losses it allows before the limit, so the trader sees both. Our guide to how to reduce drawdown covers the methods that keep that budget intact.
Session limits where the firm has none. Most firms enforce a daily loss limit of 3% to 5%, which closes the platform on a bad day whether the trader wants it closed or not. Our guide to daily vs maximum drawdown explains why that rule ends more evaluations than any other, and why Pipcy chose not to have one. The consequence for the plan is direct: on Pipcy, the daily stop in section 7 is the only daily stop there is. The plan has to supply the brake the rules do not, and this page's recommendation is that the daily stop be written first, sized at two or three planned losses, and treated as the one rule that is never negotiated.
Pace, minimum days and payouts. Pipcy requires three trading days on each evaluation phase and sets no time limit, so the plan does not need to manufacture activity to satisfy a calendar or rush a target before a deadline. Both are common structural causes of overtrading at firms with higher minimums and fixed windows. On the funded stage, the first payout request is available fourteen calendar days after the first trade, with 5% realised profit and five active trading days; payout requests are processed within 48 hours, and later requests are available every seven days. The plan's review section should note the payout cycle so that pace is planned rather than felt. How the funded stage works in full is in our guides to the funded account and how funded accounts work.
One rule to add. On a funded account the plan should include a line that most personal plans lack: what happens after the evaluation is failed. It is a possibility, and a trader who has decided in advance to take a week off, review the journal and retry with the same plan will handle it better than one who decides in the hour after the breach.
Sticking to a plan is a design problem before it is a discipline problem. Make the rules mechanical so nothing is decided in the moment, keep the plan visible, run the checklist before every trade, journal every deviation with its reason, and grade each day on adherence rather than profit. A plan followed on a losing day is a success.
Make the rules mechanical. A rule that requires judgement in the moment will be bent in the moment. "Stop when I feel I am trading badly" cannot be followed; "stop at -1.5% or three trades, whichever comes first" can. Every rule in section 7 should be checkable by a timer, a counter or the account balance, none of which have opinions.
Keep the plan in sight. The plan belongs on the second screen, or printed and taped beside it, where it is seen during the session. The session limits in particular should be the last thing read before the first trade.
Run the checklist. The pre-trade checklist is the plan compressed to the lines that go wrong most: are all setup conditions present, is the reason written, is the size right, are the stop and target attached, am I inside the trade cap, am I outside the recovery window. Reading six lines takes twenty seconds and it is the twenty seconds in which most bad trades die.
Journal the deviations as well as the trades. Every trade gets logged, but the entries that matter most are the ones where a rule was broken. Tag them. At the review, the tagged trades are looked at as a group, and in most journals they underperform the planned trades by a margin that ends the argument about whether the rules are worth keeping.
Grade the day on adherence. The scorecard for a session is the answer to one question: did I follow the plan? A losing day on which every rule was followed is a good day, because the strategy's edge will show up over the sample. A winning day on which three rules were broken is a bad day, because the profit came from luck and the broken rules will be broken again. Switching the daily grade from money to adherence lowers the emotional charge of each trade, which makes the plan easier to keep.
When you break it anyway. Everyone does. The rule for a broken rule is that the breach is logged, the session is ended if a session limit was crossed, and nothing about the plan is changed until the scheduled review. A plan revised in the aftermath of a breach is being edited by the same state that caused the breach.
A trading plan checklist is the plan compressed into the short list of confirmations run before the session, before each trade, and after the session. It enforces the plan without replacing it. A pre-trade checklist of six lines, read every time, catches most of the trades a plan exists to prevent, in about twenty seconds of reading.
Before the session
Before each trade
After the session
The first four lines of the pre-trade list are the strategy; the last two are the plan. It is the last two that separate a trader with rules from a trader with a setup.
A trading plan is a written set of rules covering the whole trading process: which markets and sessions you trade, which strategy and setups, how entries and exits are defined, how much you risk per trade and per day, when you stop, and how you review. It is written before the session so decisions are made calmly, in advance.
A strategy defines a setup: the conditions for entry, where the stop goes, where the target is. A plan contains the strategy and adds the rules that govern the trader: which sessions, how much risk, how many trades, what happens after a loss, when to stop, when to review. A strategy can be shared; a plan is personal.
Six lines are enough to start: one market, one session, one strategy written as conditions someone else could apply, a fixed risk per trade, a daily loss stop, and a commitment to journal every trade. Trade those six lines unchanged for a month, tag every deviation in the journal, then add the remaining sections at the first monthly review.
On a schedule, decided in advance. A weekly review checks adherence and results; a monthly review is the only time the plan's numbers change, and only on journal evidence. A plan changed after a bad day is being edited by the state that caused it. Run any new plan unchanged for two full weeks before the first change.
Yes. A plan held in memory is a set of intentions, and intentions bend after a loss or a big win. A written plan makes the rules checkable: a timer, a trade counter or the account balance can tell you whether you followed it, and a journal can tag the times you did not. Writing also exposes rules never decided.
A trading plan checklist is the plan compressed into short lists of confirmations run before the session, before each trade and after the session. The pre-trade list matters most: setup conditions present, reason written, size calculated, stop and target attached, inside the trade cap, outside the recovery window. Twenty seconds that stop most of the trades a plan prevents.
A funded account has a fixed maximum loss and a profit target, so the plan must state risk per trade as a number of losses against the limit, and supply session limits for rules the firm does not impose. On Pipcy, with a 12% static maximum and no daily drawdown, the plan's own daily stop is the only daily brake.
A trading plan is the document that makes a strategy survivable. It decides, in advance and in writing, what you trade, how you enter and exit, how much you risk, when you stop, and when you look back, so that none of those things are decided in the minutes after a loss or the hour after a win. Most traders write the strategy sections and skip the session limits, and the session limits are where accounts are kept.
Use the nine-section template, write the session limits first, size the numbers to the account rather than the ambition, run the plan unchanged for two weeks, and grade each day on whether you followed it. On Pipcy Classic and Pips Mastery, the static maximum loss, the 3-day minimum and the absence of a time limit make the plan easier to keep than at most firms, and the absence of a daily drawdown makes the plan's own daily stop the rule that matters most.
Written by Vladimir Rybakov, Head of PIPCY Academy, CFTe-certified with 19 years of trading experience.
Fact-checked by Snir Ahiel, former co-founder of The5ers and risk management specialist at Pipcy, with 15+ years trading Forex, Stocks, and Options.
Risk disclosure: Trading involves substantial risk. Pipcy provides simulated trading evaluations for educational and assessment purposes. Simulated performance does not represent real trading results, and becoming a funded trader is not guaranteed. Nothing here is financial or investment advice.
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