The answer

The answer: a trading plan template is a record you decide in advance, not a document that gets the market right

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

What a trading plan template is: a frame that puts your trading rules into words

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

Required fields and the six-stage flow: from market check to post-trade review

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.

• Date, market, timeframe: when, which market and on which timeframe you are looking.
• Observed facts: only the facts you can confirm now, such as price, levels and volume, recorded separately from interpretation.
• Setup condition: the situation that forms the premise of the trade (for example, reaching the boundary of a defined range).
• Entry condition: which condition, once met, sends the order.
• Invalidation condition: the condition under which you judge the premise has broken. Reach it and the plan is void.
• Stop approach: where and on what basis the stop sits (the price itself is fixed by calculation).
• Target approach: where and under what condition you take profit.
• Loss allowance: the maximum loss you allow on this trade (the amount is produced in the lot calculator).
• Expected costs: the estimate for spread, commission, swap and the like (confirmed in the cost calculator).
• Event check: the times of the day’s main economic events and how you treat trading around them.
• Order type: market, limit or stop, and how you set the time in force.
• No-trade conditions: a clear line for the state in which you do not trade.
• Review time: a time, once during the day, to inspect the plan.

Separating the record

Separate observed facts, hypothesis, rules and execution decisions

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.

One consistent fictional case

A fictional case: Plan A, Plan B and stand-aside conditions

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.

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

Five-minute versus detailed version: do not let the pre-trade checklist grow too long

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.

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 plan alone is not enough: connect to sizing, cost and backtesting

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.

Educational mini-tool

Trading-plan field builder (educational)

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.

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

Common failures and how to check for them

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.

• Putting a forecast at the centre of the plan: make the directional call the star and you tend to abandon the whole plan when it is wrong. Return conditions and actions to the leading role.
• No stand-aside condition: with only Plan A and B, you force an entry in scenes that fit neither. Always write at least one no-trade condition.
• A checklist so long it is not read: running only the detailed version every time makes it a formality. Use the five-minute version mainly and move the detailed version to weekly.
• Doing the maths in your head inside the plan: writing a loss allowance or lot by intuition lets error accumulate. Copy in the results of lot and cost calculation.
• Rewriting with hindsight: fixing the original plan after seeing the outcome erases the review material. Keep the original record and handle it by appending.

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

Amending a plan after a trade: keep the original record and append

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

Using it in the Financial Templates Hub, and the stages

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.

Summary

Summary: answering the main question and the next step

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.

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