Level 3 — Becoming a Better Trader
Building a trading plan
5 minute read
Decide, record, review
Illustrative example · not live data
Write your rules
Record what happened
Review patterns
A trading plan is a written set of rules you follow every time. It removes on-the-spot decisions, which are where emotions do their damage.
A simple plan answers five questions before every trade: What am I buying and why? Where do I enter? Where is my stop-loss (where am I wrong)? Where is my target? How much am I risking?
If you can't answer all five, you don't have a trade — you have a gamble. Write the answers down. The journal on this site is built exactly for this: entry, stop, target and size for every trade.
Review your journal weekly. Look for patterns: which setups worked, which mistakes repeat. Improving one repeated mistake at a time is how traders actually get better.
Key points to remember
- A plan is written rules, decided in advance
- Five questions: what, why, entry, stop, size
- No plan = gambling
- Review your journal weekly and fix one mistake at a time