How many setups should a playbook contain?

As many as you can trade consistently and evaluate. Each setup needs enough tagged trades to say something about it, so a short list traded often is usually easier to assess than a long list traded rarely.

What is the difference between a playbook and a trading plan?

The playbook defines the setups. The trading plan decides when and how much to trade them, with risk limits, stop conditions and a review routine. A plan refers to the playbook; the playbook does not replace the plan.

Trading playbook

A trading playbook is a library of the specific setups a trader takes, each described by its entry conditions, invalidation, management rules and reference examples, and ideally by its own statistics. It makes setups repeatable and lets results be measured per setup rather than for the account as a whole.

Senzoukria · Glossary · Updated September 2026

Anatomy of a playbook entry

Name and context: when the setup applies, for example a session phase or a market condition.
Criteria: conditions that can be checked before entry, one per line, such as a level retest, a delta condition or a volume profile feature.
Invalidation: where the idea is wrong, which defines the stop.
Management: target logic, partial exits, time stop.
Examples: annotated charts of good and bad instances, including trades that met the criteria and failed.
Statistics: number of trades, win rate, average result in R, with the date range they cover.

Why per-setup statistics matter

An account's overall result mixes setups that work with setups that do not. A trader with a flat year may have one setup with a positive expectancy and two that give it back. Tagging every trade with its setup separates them. The same caution as for any statistic applies: five trades per setup describe five trades, not an edge, and a setup that looks excellent on a small sample should be kept under observation rather than traded at larger size.

Writing criteria that can be checked also exposes drift: trades that were taken 'almost' matching a setup can be counted and their separate result measured.

In Senzoukria

The journal's Playbook tab stores setups as cards with a name, a color, an optional target win rate between 0 and 100, a two-line description, a list of criteria one per line, of which the first four are shown on the card, and a link to a reference image. Trades are tagged with a setup when they are logged or edited, and the Dashboard tab reports Win Rate by Setup with the trade count and net P&L of each tagged setup; untagged trades do not appear in that breakdown. The target win rate is a reminder on the card: nothing in the software compares trades with it or promises a setup will reach it. Deleting a setup does not delete the trades tagged with it.

Common mistakes

Criteria that describe a feeling rather than a condition on the chart.
Adding setups faster than trades accumulate to evaluate them.
Keeping only the successful examples, which recreates survivorship bias inside the playbook.
Judging a setup on win rate alone, without the average win and loss.

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Frequently asked questions

How many setups should a playbook contain?: As many as you can trade consistently and evaluate. Each setup needs enough tagged trades to say something about it, so a short list traded often is usually easier to assess than a long list traded rarely.
What is the difference between a playbook and a trading plan?: The playbook defines the setups. The trading plan decides when and how much to trade them, with risk limits, stop conditions and a review routine. A plan refers to the playbook; the playbook does not replace the plan.

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