Execution

A trading plan turns every rule covered elsewhere in this course, entry criteria, position size, when to stop, into a single document written before a trade goes live, so none of it has to be decided under pressure. Download the blank trading plan template (.txt), the same twelve sections covered below, laid out ready to fill in with your own numbers. A document, not a memory Something “known in your head” and something written down behave very differently under pressure. A vague intention is easy to bend in the moment it’s tested, because there’s nothing concrete to check it against. A written rule, entry criteria worded specifically enough to say yes or no, is much harder to quietly reinterpret mid-trade. Writing the plan down doesn’t make a trader more disciplined by itself, but it removes one of the easiest ways discipline slips: not remembering, in the moment, what was decided in advance. ...

What happens in the minutes before the market opens decides more of the session than most traders give it credit for, because reacting to a price move without first checking what else is scheduled to cause it is a specific, avoidable kind of unprepared. Know what’s scheduled before price tells you Checking which data releases, earnings, or central bank speakers are due for the instruments being traded turns a sudden move into something explainable instead of something that looks like the market simply going strange. A GER40 trader who knows German PMI lands at 8am reads the pre-market move very differently to one who doesn’t, and only one of them is in a position to judge whether a setup that appears right after is worth trusting. ...

A checklist isn’t there to teach anything new, everything on it should already be understood, it’s there to make sure something known doesn’t get skipped on the one day attention is somewhere else. Why a checklist beats memory under pressure Pilots and surgeons run checklists not because they don’t know the steps, but because a step that’s completely obvious on a calm day gets skipped in a way that’s invisible until the consequence shows up, and it’s always the person most confident they’d never forget who forgets it. Trading has the same structure: a rule so basic it feels beneath writing down is the kind of rule that quietly gets missed on a rushed morning. ...

Planning a trade and getting into it are two different skills, and the gap between them is where a good setup on the chart turns into a mediocre one on the account, because the price filled at rarely matches the price imagined in the plan. The level you planned vs the level you got A limit order fills on the planned level. A market order sent after price has already moved fills further along, at a worse price, the gap known as slippage. ...

Most of what should happen once a trade is open was already decided before it went live, which means managing a trade well is mostly a discipline problem, following what the plan already said, not a live decision-making problem. What’s already decided vs what needs a real call The stop and target come from the plan, and if the strategy calls for moving to breakeven after a defined amount of favourable movement, that’s a rule to apply, not a feeling to wait for. What needs real judgement in the moment is rare: a major, unscheduled piece of news that invalidates the setup’s whole premise, not the ordinary wobble of price moving against an open position the way price always does. ...

The review after a session is where a plan gets tested against reality, and skipping it because the day already felt good or bad throws away the one part of the process built specifically to be more objective than that feeling. Judge the trade against the plan, not the outcome A losing trade taken to plan, correct setup, right size, stop where it belonged, is a process success even though the outcome was a loss, because no edge wins every time. A winning trade taken outside the rules is a process failure that happened to pay off, and treating it as a good decision because it worked out teaches the wrong lesson for next time. The review’s job is separating those two, which the P&L on its own can’t do. ...

Recognising the moment a session has stopped being productive, before it turns into a session that actively costs money, is its own skill, separate from having good rules to trade by in the first place. The rule-based reasons to stop Some stopping points are mechanical and decided in advance: the daily loss limit is hit, a set number of trades for the day has been taken, or a fixed session end time has arrived. None of these need judging in the moment, they’re triggers written into the plan precisely so the decision to stop doesn’t depend on how the trader feels about stopping right then. ...

A trade journal is where every other part of this course gets checked against what happened. A plan, an entry, a managed position, a review, none of it compounds into real improvement without a record specific enough to look back on. What to log, beyond just win or lose A useful entry covers the setup type, the planned entry, stop, and target against what was filled, the size taken, and the reason for the entry written in the trader’s own words at the time, not reconstructed afterward to sound more logical than it was. Whether that reason held up, checked honestly once the trade is closed, is the part most journals skip and the part that teaches something. ...