Financial Market Tools for Traders, Investors & Finance Professionals
Financial Templates Hub — Trading Documents Series 02
A trading plan template is not a document for predicting the market. It fixes, before you trade, what makes you enter, what makes you stop, how much loss you will accept and what you will not do today, so you can review your own decision process afterwards. This guide organises the required fields, how long a pre-trade checklist should be, and how to split Plan A, Plan B and stand-aside rules, using one consistent fictional educational case, then shows how the plan connects to sizing, cost and backtest tools.
Key takeaways
The answer
What a trading plan template really decides is not which way the market will move. Before you enter a trade, it fixes your entry condition, invalidation condition, stop approach, loss allowance and what you will not do today (the no-trade conditions) in writing, so you can look back later against the same standard. With those in place, even when your standard wavers inside an unrealised loss or gain, you can confirm from the record what you originally decided.
Put a direction forecast or price target at the centre of the plan instead, and you are left with an opinion about whether you were right or wrong, but no decision process you can carry forward. A trading plan is a frame for acting as decided when a condition is met and standing aside when it is not, and a mechanism for not rationalising the mood of the moment after the fact. For the wider picture of document design that this sits inside, see the Financial Document Templates Guide.
Every number, instrument, date and condition in this article is fictional educational data, and none of it recommends buying or selling a specific product or indicates the direction of a current market. A template is an aid that makes documents easier to draft; it is not investment, legal or tax advice, and not a substitute for a review, examination or approval. We state that up front.
Definition and purpose
A trading plan template is a fill-in frame that lays out, in advance, the items you should decide for one trade, or for one day of trading. By filling the blanks, you avoid getting stuck on how to write a trade plan and put conditions into words from the same angle every time. The basic form is a two-stage use: build one Today’s Trading Plan in the morning, then reread it as a pre-trade checklist just before the trade.
The purpose sorts into three parts. First, to reduce impulsive entries. Decide the conditions in advance and you jump onto moving prices without a reason less often. Second, to run a pre-trade risk check the same way every time. Fix the loss allowance and stop approach in advance and you curb risk swelling on emotion. Third, to review your decision process afterwards. Keep the gap between plan and outcome and you can pair it with the trading journal template to drive improvement.
What matters here is the line that a plan as a trading rules template is not a tool for calculating numbers. Specific stop prices and lot sizes are produced, as described below, in the dedicated lot and cost calculators, and their results are copied into the plan. Keep the plan as the store for numbers and the calculators as the tools, and the same frame reuses across a forex trading plan or a CFD trade plan alike.
Required fields
A trading plan starts from checking the market, then moves one way through condition, risk, execution, stand-aside and post-trade review. The SVG below is a concept diagram of those six stages (it scrolls horizontally). Deciding what to record at each stage makes missing entries easier to spot.
Put into words, the required fields to lay out in the plan are as follows. Move optional fields to the detailed version described later, and begin operating with the required ones only.
Separating the record
The biggest reason a plan gets rewritten with hindsight is mixing fact and interpretation in the same field. So split the following four into separate fields. Distinguish them by heading and symbol, not colour alone, and fix what goes in each field.
1 Observed fact / FACT
A field for only the facts you can confirm now, such as price, levels and volume. Write it as Pair-X ranged 99.40 to 100.20, without mixing in interpretation.
2 Hypothesis / VIEW
A field for the interpretation or assumption you build from the facts. State plainly that it is only a hypothesis, and being wrong is not a failure of the plan.
3 Rule / RULE
A field to fix in advance as if this condition, then this action. Write entry, invalidation and stand-aside all as rules.
4 Execution decision / ACT
A field to add afterwards for the action you actually took at trade time. The gap between rule and execution becomes review material.
One consistent fictional case
Fictional educational example. Not a real client, provider, product or contract, and not legal advice or a document for filing.
Below is one fictional case used throughout this article. The instrument name, numbers and times are all illustrative; they are neither a trading recommendation nor a direction for the current market. The plan ID is TP-2026-0714-A, the instrument is the fictional major currency pair “Pair-X”, it was created on 14 July 2026 at 08:45 JST, the environment timeframe is 1h and the execution timeframe is 15m. The observed fact is that over the last 3 sessions Pair-X ranged 99.40 to 100.20 (fictional value).
In this case, rather than forecasting the market and deciding a direction, we branch into three on observable conditions. Plan A, Plan B and the stand-aside conditions are all fixed in advance as condition then action.
| Branch | Condition (observable fact) | Action rule | Invalidation / stand-aside |
|---|---|---|---|
| Plan A | A clear break above the range upper bound 100.20 with a confirmed pullback | Wait-for-pullback limit entry, stop on a recent-swing basis (about 20 pips), take-profit approach fixed in advance | After the breakout, a fall back below 99.80 means the premise has broken, so exit |
| Plan B | A rebound signal appears near the range lower bound 99.40 | Limit entry after the rebound is confirmed, stop outside the lower bound, loss allowance within the same envelope | A clear break below the lower bound voids the rebound scenario |
| Stand-aside | Directionless round-trips near the mid 99.80 / within 30 minutes of a scheduled release / two losses reached that day | Take no new entry (no-trade) | While in this bucket, A and B do not fire |
The point is that the state fitting neither A nor B is written as an explicit third bucket, the stand-aside. Without it, you tend to force a reason to enter on round-trips at the range midpoint. Because only the conditions and actions are fixed, with no numeric target or direction, it is harder to drift between buckets on mood. Basing a stop width and turning a stop distance into a position size are covered in the FX and CFD Lot Size Calculator Guide.
Sizing the checklist
A pre-trade checklist stops being used unless it is a length you can reread every time. So keep a short “five-minute version” and a “detailed version” for review separately: use the five-minute version day to day, and the detailed version for weekend reviews or when testing a new strategy. The table below lays out both sets of items for the same fictional case.
| Item | Five-minute (every time) | Detailed (weekly / testing) |
|---|---|---|
| Date, market, timeframe | Required | Required |
| Entry condition | Required (1–2 lines) | Required (with rationale) |
| Invalidation condition | Required | Required |
| Stop approach, loss allowance | Required (numbers copied in) | Required (record the derivation too) |
| No-trade conditions | Required | Required |
| Observed-fact field | Optional (1 line) | Required (facts only) |
| Expected costs | Optional | Required (estimate copied in) |
| Event check | Time only | Time plus behaviour around it |
| Review time, post-trade review | Review time only | Difference between plan and actual |
As a guide, keeping the five-minute version to five to seven items and the detailed version to around twelve makes them easier to sustain. Add items only where a repeated mistake appears. Build only the detailed version from the start and it tends to be left unread just before entry. Fields that grow with the holding period, such as day trading or swing, are easier to manage if you switch them in as an optional block of the detailed version.
Tool connections
A trading plan template supplies the frame for a decision, but it does not produce the numbers themselves. Turning a loss allowance into a position size, estimating round-turn cost, validating whether a strategy holds up: these belong to other dedicated tools and articles. The diagram below shows where the plan goes to fetch its numbers.
Specifically, turning a loss allowance into an actual position size is covered in the FX and CFD Lot Size Calculator Guide, estimating round-turn cost including spread and commission in the Trading Cost Calculator Guide, and validating whether a setup condition worked in the past in the TradingView Backtesting Guide. To gauge the wider market backdrop in advance, the Macro Analysis Guide also helps. Copy the numbers produced there into the plan with an as-of date and source attached.
Work such as turning a loss allowance into a position size or estimating round-turn cost is more accurate done in the dedicated calculation guides rather than inside the plan. Copy the numbers you produce into the plan and conditions and numbers sit together in one record. Both let you follow the steps on fictional educational data.
Educational mini-tool
Choose the market type, expected holding period, strategy style, order type, event check and detail level, and the tool presents the fields to write in the plan and their order, the numbers to prepare in advance, and links to related calculations and articles. It does not output direction, price targets or a recommended risk percentage. It is teaching material for confirming the sequence of fields; entering client names, account numbers and the like is not required. The defaults match the fictional case TP-2026-0714-A.
This output shows the sequence of fields as teaching material. It contains no direction, price target or recommended risk percentage. The templates in the live service may have different fields or screens, so check the current templates in the Financial Templates Hub for the official version.
If JavaScript is disabled, the initial state above (FX, day trading, breakout, limit, event scheduled, five-minute version) shows as a static output example. Changing the selections swaps the fields, but in every case it shows no specific trading decision.
Failures and checks
Here are the typical ways a trading plan stops working, together with checks. Each is prevented not by making the plan more complex, but by keeping to the operation of the required fields.
As a check, reading aloud just the four points, entry condition, invalidation condition, loss allowance and no-trade conditions, right before the trade is simple and effective. Confirm event release times from the primary source of each exchange or data provider on the day, and attach the confirmation date and source to the plan.
Recording changes
Revising a plan when conditions change after an order is not a problem in itself. What becomes a problem is deleting the original record and rewriting it to look as if you decided this from the start. So always make a change by appending, and keep the original conditions, stop and loss allowance as they were. In the appended note, record the time, reason and author of the change.
For example, in the fictional case TP-2026-0714-A, if you review a stop originally placed on a recent-swing basis, you keep the original value and add a line such as “12:00 review / reason: round-trips at the range midpoint continued / changed by: self”. A change such as widening the stop once you are already in a losing position becomes easier to notice precisely because the record remains, and it can feed the next plan. This idea of keeping version, difference and reason for change connects, in more formal document operation, to version control and approval workflows. The design thinking is covered in the article on financial document version control, approval workflows and audit trails.
Note that a plan output from a template assumes you personally confirm the numbers, instrument, times and order conditions before acting on it. The output is a draft; reconciling facts, proper nouns and mandatory wording remains a step for a person. To design your loss limits themselves as a single document, the article on the risk management plan template is a useful reference.
Using it in the Hub
SG Group’s Financial Templates Hub holds a set of templates sorted by purpose, so you can fill in a document while confirming the structure of a trading plan or pre-trade check. Start by confirming the frame in a free template you can use without registration, compare it against this article’s required fields and surface the fields your own operation is missing. Because the specific free templates, supported languages and output or saving behaviour can change, check the current details in the Financial Templates Hub itself.
When you reach business use, such as saving repeatedly or switching among several output formats, the natural step is to consider the features available in higher plans. Because what you can do at each stage may change, this article does not fix numbers such as price or retention period; check the latest in the comparison of Free, Pro and Premium. Other documents close to a trading plan (the trading journal and the investment thesis note) live in the same Hub. English learning articles can be found from the article index.
FAQ
Summary
The answer to “what does a trading plan template decide” is not the direction of the market, but the conditions and limits you fix before the trade. Decide the entry condition, invalidation condition, stop approach, loss allowance and no-trade conditions in advance, separate observed facts, hypothesis, rules and execution decisions into different fields, and do not rewrite with hindsight: this design is the skeleton of a plan that reduces impulse and can be reviewed afterwards.
In practice, if you hold to five points, (1) start from the six required fields, (2) write Plan A, Plan B and stand-aside rules as condition then action, (3) split the five-minute and detailed versions, (4) produce lot, cost and validation numbers in dedicated tools and copy them in, and (5) keep the original record and append when you change something, daily use and review coexist. After that, it is just a matter of filling the frame for your own market and strategy.
Read next
FH03: Trading Journal Template — What to Record and How to Run Weekly Reviews — turn the gap between the plan you set and what actually happened from a record into improvement.
Disclaimer
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