Preparation

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. ...