A One-Page Trading Plan With Rules So Clear Someone Else Takes the Same Trade

A trading plan is a set of rules written in advance: what you trade, when, where you enter, how much you risk and how you exit. Most traders have a plan in their head, but a plan in your head shifts with your mood. This article focuses on one thing: writing rules so precise that two people reading the same plan would take the same trade, at the same price, with the same stop. Until you can do that, your results don’t measure a system. They measure how you felt that day.

This is different from the trading journal, which records results after the trade, and the pre-trade checklist, which you run every day before the session. The plan is the rulebook both of them refer to.

Why it must be clear enough for someone else to follow

A vague rule leaves the decision to the moment you see the chart, and at that moment you always have feelings. Trades you want look like they pass, trades you fear look like they don’t. That creates two problems at once.

1. You can’t measure it. If a rule can be read several ways, 50 trades in your journal may come from 50 slightly different rules. The win rate says nothing about the system.
2. You can’t backtest it. A rule that can’t be coded or counted on old charts can never be shown to have an edge.

If two people read the same rule and take different trades, it isn’t a rule yet. It is a feeling written on paper.

The 10 sections of a one-page plan

Section	What it must answer
1. Markets and sessions	Which pair or asset, which timeframe, which hours in Thai time (UTC+7)
2. Setup definition	Conditions that must all be true, measurable, checked at the candle close
3. Entry trigger	What event makes you enter, and at what price
4. Stop and size formula	Where the stop goes, minimum and maximum distance, how lot size is calculated
5. Exits	Take profit, time exit, whether the stop may be moved
6. Risk caps	Per trade, per day, per week, and how many positions at once
7. News rule	How many minutes before and after major news you stay out, what happens to open trades
8. When NOT to trade	Wide spread, cap reached, poor sleep, or a situation the plan doesn’t cover
9. Review schedule	What you look at daily, weekly, and every N trades
10. Rule-change procedure	How many trades, what test, and how the version number changes

The ambiguity test

A half-hour check of whether your plan is clear enough:

1. Collect 10–20 chart screenshots from periods you traded. Crop each one at the candle where the decision is made, so the outcome is hidden.
2. Give a friend only the plan, with no extra explanation, and ask them to mark each chart: trade or no trade, and if trade, where the entry, stop and target are.
3. Answer the same charts yourself, then compare chart by chart.
4. Wherever you disagree, find the rule that allowed two readings and rewrite it. Repeat until every chart matches.

With no friend available, do it with yourself: answer the same set again a week later. A stricter version is to ask whether the rule could be coded as an EA. If a programmer would have to ask “how strong?” or “how close, in pips?”, the rule isn’t clear yet.

Turning vague rules into testable ones

Vague rule	Testable rule (example)
Strong trend	On the closed H1 candle, ADX(14) > 25 and the close is above the 50 EMA
Pullback to support	The low of any of the last 3 candles touched or went below the 20 EMA
Strong candle	Body is at least 60% of the candle’s full range, and the range is at least ATR(14)
Tight stop	Stop below the lowest low of the last 5 candles, minus 0.2 × ATR(14)
Avoid news	No new trades from 30 minutes before to 30 minutes after high-impact news for either currency of the pair
Exit when it runs out of steam	Take profit at 2R; if neither TP nor stop is hit, close at 23:00 Thai time (UTC+7)
Small risk	Risk 1% of equity at entry, rounded down to 0.01 lot

Three principles behind the conversion:

• Every adjective becomes a number. Strong, near, wide and fast all need a value and a unit.
• Say when you check it. “ADX above 25” can pass and then fail while a candle is still forming. Write that you check at the candle close only, the same issue as indicators that change their past values in Repainting and lookahead.
• Use the tool for what it actually measures. ADX measures trend strength, not direction, so you need a separate direction condition such as price above the 50 EMA. Details in ADX and trend strength.

The numbers in the table show the form a rule should take. They are not values tested to work. Whatever values you use need your own testing.

The risk section, worked step by step

This section should need a calculator, not interpretation. Example: a 5,000-dollar account trading EURUSD (1 pip on 1 lot is worth 10 dollars at most brokers; check your own contract specification).

Rule	Value
Risk per trade	1% = 50 dollars
Daily cap	3% = 150 dollars
Weekly cap	6% = 300 dollars

This trade’s stop is 30 pips away.

1. Lot = 50 ÷ (30 × 10) = 50 ÷ 300 = 0.1667
2. Round down to 0.16 lot (rounding up would risk more than planned)
3. Actual risk = 0.16 × 30 × 10 = 48 dollars

Check: at 0.16 lot, 1 pip is worth 1.60 dollars, so a 30-pip stop costs 48 dollars, within the 50 planned. The full formula and the gold case are in Position size from your stop loss.

Now write the daily cap as a testable rule: a new trade is allowed only if today’s loss + the new trade’s risk ≤ 150 dollars.

• Loss 1: running loss 48, room left 102
• Loss 2: running loss 96, room left 54
• Loss 3: running loss 144, room left 6
• Trade 4: 144 + 48 = 192, above 150, so it is not allowed. Done for the day.

Three losses reach the daily cap. And 300 ÷ 48 = 6.25, so 6 losses in a week (288 lost) stop you for the week, because a 7th would bring the total to 336, above 300.

Two more things the plan must state:

• Count all costs. With a 1-pip spread, a losing trade costs 0.16 × 31 × 10 = 49.60 dollars. Three losses = 148.80, still under 150 but with almost no room.
• Say which balance the 1% comes from. Using current equity, 1% after the first loss is 49.52 and after the second 49.04. Both still round down to 0.16 lot. Write down which figure you use so you never decide again mid-session.

Why a daily cap matters and how to enforce it on yourself: Daily loss limits and revenge trading.

One-page plan template, ready to copy

TRADING PLAN  version ___  in force from ___  (never edited on a trading day)

1. Markets and sessions
   Asset: ___   Timeframe: ___
   Trade only ___:___ to ___:___ Thai time (UTC+7)   No weekend holds: yes/no

2. Setup (all must be true, checked at the candle close only)
   a. ___ (number + indicator + settings)
   b. ___
   c. ___

3. Entry trigger
   When ___   enter at ___ (e.g. the open of the next candle)

4. Stop and size
   Stop goes at ___   minimum ___ pips, maximum ___ pips (outside this = skip)
   lot = (equity × ___%) ÷ (stop distance in pips × pip value of 1 lot), rounded down

5. Exits
   Take profit: ___   Time exit: ___
   The stop may only be moved to: ___   Never move the stop further from price

6. Risk caps
   Per trade ___%   per day ___%   per week ___%   max open positions ___
   A new trade is allowed only if loss so far in the period + new trade's risk ≤ cap

7. News
   No new trades from ___ minutes before to ___ minutes after high-impact news for ___
   Open trades: ___

8. Do NOT trade when
   Spread above ___   slept less than ___ hours   just lost ___ in a row
   The situation is not covered by this plan

9. Review schedule
   Daily: log every trade + plan version
   Weekly: count trades that followed the rules ___ of ___
   Every ___ trades: win rate, average R, longest losing streak, drawdown

10. Rule-change procedure
   Ideas can be proposed any time, onto the to-test list, but go live only when
   - the current version has ___ trades or more
   - the idea passes a test on data not used to come up with it
   - one change at a time, new version number, reason written down
   Risk can be reduced any time. Raising risk or loosening rules only via this procedure.

Signed / date ___

Versioning the plan

Give the plan a version number, such as v1.0 and v1.1, and add a plan-version column to every trade in your journal. When you review, you need to know which trades came from which rule set. Without that, results from old and new rules blend together and you can’t conclude anything.

A simple way to do it:

• Keep the plan in one file. Google Docs version history or Git both work. Never delete old versions.
• End the plan with a changelog, one line per change: date, what changed, why, and what the evidence was.
• Change one thing at a time. If you change three rules together and results move, you won’t know which one did it.

Why changing rules during a drawdown is dangerous

A losing streak is when you most want to change the rules, and when the data tells you least. Take a hypothetical system with a real edge: it wins 45% of trades, winners make 1.5R, losers cost 1R. Average per trade = 0.45 × 1.5 − 0.55 × 1 = +0.125R.

Using the binomial distribution (counting every possible number of wins), here is the chance that the running total is still negative after a given number of trades, assuming trades are independent.

Trades	Chance the total is still negative
10	26.6%
20	25.2%
50	19.7%
100	13.4%
200	6.7%
300	3.6%

Working the 20-trade row: total = 1.5 × wins − losses, which is negative with 7 wins or fewer (7 × 1.5 − 13 = −2.5, while 8 wins gives 12 − 12 = 0). The chance of 7 or fewer wins out of 20 at 45% is 25.2%.

Three lessons from this:

1. Being down after a few dozen trades doesn’t mean the rules are wrong. Good systems are often negative over short runs, so changing rules then is reacting to noise. More on trade counts in How many trades before results mean anything.
2. A new rule starts counting from zero. The trades you collected can’t judge the new rule. If you change every time you lose, you never collect enough trades to learn what works.
3. A rule written after seeing the losses tends to be designed to dodge exactly those losses, for example a filter that happens to remove the last 5 losing trades. That is overfitting, the same trap as tuning an EA until the backtest looks perfect. See Overfitting: pick the plateau, not the peak.

The rule-change procedure

Write this into the plan on day one, while you are calm.

1. Write the idea down first. Ideas that come during a trading day go on the to-test list. Never apply them straight away.
2. Wait for enough trades on the current version, for example 50 trades of the same setup. That number isn’t a standard, but it must be fixed in advance, and more trades separate luck from edge better.
3. Test on data you didn’t use to form the idea (out-of-sample). If the idea came from this year’s trades, test it on another period or a similar market. How to split test periods is in Walk-forward testing, and the more ideas you try, the easier it is to find a false winner. See Multiple testing and data snooping.
4. Change one rule, raise the version number, start it at the beginning of a week, and consider half the usual risk per trade at first.
5. The one exception: reducing risk or stopping trading is allowed any time, without waiting.

You can lower risk any time. Raising risk or loosening a rule only happens through the procedure you wrote in advance.

The news rule and when NOT to trade

People usually write these two sections too briefly. Examples of testable wording:

• News: no new trades from 30 minutes before to 30 minutes after high-impact news for either currency in the pair, according to the calendar you always use. Open trades keep their stop. How to read the calendar: Reading the economic calendar. Why stops can fill beyond their price around news: News spikes, wide spreads and slippage.
• Spread: above twice its normal level = no entry. Write the normal level as a number in the plan.
• You: slept less than your set minimum, ill, or angry = no trading that day. See Sleep, fatigue and night trading.
• A situation the plan doesn’t cover = no entry, and note it for the next review.

The review schedule

• Daily: log every trade right after it closes, with a “followed the rules?” column and the plan version. Use the table from the trading journal.
• Weekly: count the share of trades that followed the rules before you look at profit and loss, because that number is under your control.
• Each time you reach your set number of trades: look at win rate, average R, longest losing streak and drawdown, then consider the to-test list.

To check each day whether you are ready to follow the plan, run the pre-trade checklist before opening the platform.

Common mistakes

• Writing intentions instead of rules. “Be disciplined” and “don’t be greedy” can’t be checked. Turn them into actions, such as closing the platform when the daily cap is reached
• Detailed entry rules, no exit rules. Most people exit on feelings, and exits affect results as much as entries
• Sizing by feel. The risk section must be a formula that gives one answer when you plug in the numbers
• Changing rules after a losing streak. The table above shows good systems are often negative over short runs. Use the rule-change procedure, or reduce risk instead
• No version numbers. Trades from old and new rules mix, and you can never tell which rule set produced what
• A plan several pages long. The longer it is, the more of it goes unread while trading. Keep it to one page, and give each setup its own page