A Plan the Worst Version of You Can Follow

Half the posts on this blog end the same way: write it down. The risk rules, the setups, the daily fuse, all of it, on paper, before the money moves. This is the writing-it-down post. One warning before the template: a trading plan is not a vision board, not a manifesto, and not the twelve-page document you write once and never open. It is an operating manual for the worst version of you, the one who shows up tired, tilted, three losses deep at 3 a.m., because the calm version of you does not need a plan, and the calm version is not who loses the money.

Why written beats remembered

A rule that lives in your head renegotiates itself at the exact moment it is needed, the point the playbook made and every blown account confirms. Written rules have a different property: they are falsifiable. You can hold your trades against the page and see, in black and white, whether you did what you said, which makes the plan the only honest referee of whether a bad month was the system failing or you failing the system. A trader without a plan cannot even fail properly, because there is nothing to deviate from. That distinction, system versus execution, is the one every review in the consistency post depends on, and it only exists on paper.

The one page, section by section

1. The method. What you trade, named precisely: the setups (by name, the retest, the trap fade, the pullback at the daily level), the pairs or the screener criteria that pick them, the venues, the timeframe you execute on and the one that referees. One sentence per setup on when it exists and when it does not. If this section cannot be written tightly, the problem is upstream of planning.

2. The numbers. Risk per trade as a percent and as dollars, because your hands trade dollars. The heat cap across positions. The daily fuse: how many losses or what percentage ends the session. The minimum payoff that qualifies a trade. The equity ladder steps, both directions, from the account rules. Seven numbers, roughly, and every one decided while calm.

3. The regime switch. The conditions under which the plan orders you to not trade: the chop regime from the context post, scheduled news candles, the day after the fuse trips. Doing nothing is an instruction too, and it is the instruction most plans forget to write down, which is why most traders cannot follow it.

4. The checklist. Five lines, walked before every entry: level marked, trend one timeframe up checked, volume agreeing, stop placed at the invalidation, size computed from the stop. Not twenty lines; five. The checklist is not analysis, it is the thing that makes the moment of entry mechanical, because entry is when judgment is worst.

5. The weaknesses clause. The section nobody writes and the one that pays most. Open your journal, find your three recurring failure patterns, and write each one down with a countermeasure attached: "I revenge trade after two losses → after two losses, position size halves and a third loss ends the day." "I move stops on BTC → BTC stops are entered as exchange orders, not mental ones." Generic rules patch generic traders. This section is where the plan becomes yours, and it can only be written by someone whose journal tells the truth.

6. The schedule. When you trade, when you review, when you do the daily homework from the daily chart post. A session with a start has an end, and accounts die in the overtime nobody scheduled.

7. The goals row. Process goals only: execution rate above 90%, every trade journaled, the checklist walked every time. Not "make $2,000 a month." A monthly income target is how overtrading gets scheduled, because the market does not pay on your calendar, and a trader short of an arbitrary number on the 28th becomes exactly the trader sections one through six were written to contain.

What a real one looks like

Condensed, for a crypto trader running this blog's toolkit: "I trade retests of broken daily levels and trap fades at mature ranges, on BTC, ETH and the top ten by screener volume, executing on the 15-minute with the 4-hour as referee. Risk: 1% per trade, $110 at current equity, heat cap 3%, fuse at three losses or minus 3%. Minimum 2R to structure. No trades in split-breadth chop, within 30 minutes of CPI or FOMC, or the day after a fuse. Checklist before every entry. Weaknesses: I chase green breadth mornings, so entries before 9:00 require the checklist signed twice; I hold losers past invalidation on alts, so all alt stops are exchange orders. Session 8:00-13:00, review Sunday. Goal: 95% execution, every trade in the journal." Eleven lines. It fits on one page with room for coffee stains, and the worst version of its author can follow it, which was the entire specification.

Keeping it alive

A plan decays two ways: ignored or fossilized. Against ignoring, keep it physically visible during sessions and re-read it before the first trade, thirty seconds that reliably outperform most indicators. Against fossilizing, review it on a calendar, monthly, against the journal, and amend it the way the sizing post amends models: consciously, with a written reason, never in the middle of a losing week, because mid-drawdown edits are tilt with a text editor. Version it like code if that is your culture; plan v7 with a changelog beats a document nobody remembers editing. And when a month goes wrong, the review question is always the same two-parter: did the plan fail, or did I fail the plan? Only one of those is fixable by rewriting, and the journal knows which one it was.

The plan will not give you an edge; nothing on one page can. What it does is cheaper and rarer: it makes your trading falsifiable, repeatable, and reviewable, which is the entire difference between running a business and having expensive opinions at 3 a.m. Write it this week. The worst version of you is already scheduled to show up; the only question is whether anything will be waiting to manage him.