Trading plan
A trading plan is a written set of decisions made before the session: which markets and hours to trade, which setups qualify, how much to risk per trade and per day, when to stop, and how the day will be reviewed. It turns in-the-moment choices into rules that can be checked afterwards.
Senzoukria · Glossary · Updated September 2026
What a plan contains
- Scope: instruments, contract months, sessions and the hours you will and will not trade, including scheduled releases to avoid.
- Setups: the patterns you trade, each defined precisely enough to say yes or no before entry, usually kept in a playbook.
- Risk: size per trade, maximum loss per day, maximum number of trades, and how size changes after losses or gains.
- Stop conditions: the events that end the day, such as reaching the daily loss, a number of consecutive losses or a rule violation.
- Review: what is recorded after each trade and at the end of the day, and when the plan itself is revised.
Plan for the day versus plan for the method
Two documents are often confused. The method plan changes rarely: it defines the setups, the risk rules and the review process, and it should be revised deliberately, on evidence, not after a bad afternoon. The daily plan applies it to today's market: the levels that matter, the context from the previous session and the overnight range, the scheduled releases and the scenarios you will act on. The daily plan is where a prior-session high, a value area or a macro release enters the picture.
The value of writing the daily plan before the open is that it cannot be rewritten by what the market did at 9:31. It becomes the reference against which the day's trades are judged.
Checking adherence
A plan is only useful if deviations are visible. After the session, each trade is either inside the plan or not, regardless of its result. Tracking the share of trades taken outside the plan, and their separate results, often says more about performance than any setup statistic.
In Senzoukria
The journal's Daily Notes tab keeps one note per calendar day with a Pre-Market Plan, an End of Day Review and Key Lessons, plus a mood score from 1 to 10 and a market-conditions tag: Trending up, Trending down, Range-bound, Choppy, High volatility, Low volatility, News-driven or Pre-FOMC. The Session imprint panel quotes the day's note next to a step-by-step drawing of the trading day. The Playbook tab stores setups with their criteria. Parts of the risk section can be enforced by the software: a maximum order size in Settings, the autopilot's maximum contracts and maximum daily loss, and a daily loss limit on the simulated demo account. Manual orders on a broker account are not blocked by a daily loss in the desktop; the broker's or firm's own limits apply there.
Related
In the same section
- Trading session
- Trading halt
- Trailing drawdown
- Gateway
- Trailing stop
- Trading edge
- Transaction costs
- Trades footprint
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Frequently asked questions
- How detailed should a trading plan be?
- Detailed enough that another person could tell, from the plan and the chart, whether a given trade was allowed. Vague rules such as 'trade with the trend' cannot be checked; precise ones such as a setup with named conditions and a stop location can.
- Should I change my plan after a losing day?
- Not on the strength of one day. A plan should be revised on evidence from a meaningful number of trades, at a scheduled review, and each change should be recorded so that its effect can be measured.