A genuine trading plan is a written document, not a vague mental collection of ideas about "how I like to trade." If you can't point to something in writing, you don't actually have a plan — you have a set of loosely held intentions that will evaporate the moment real emotional pressure enters the picture.
Here are the seven sections every serious plan needs, laid out in enough detail to actually be followed:
1) Markets and pairs traded — specifically which pairs you trade and, ideally, why those particular pairs suit your strategy and schedule.
2) Sessions and hours traded — the specific windows during which you're actively looking for setups, and equally important, the windows during which you deliberately stay out of the market.
3) Entry criteria — specific, mechanical, and detailed enough that someone else could follow them from the written description alone, not vague impressions like "when it looks good."
4) Exit criteria — covering both your stop-loss methodology and your profit target methodology, defined in advance rather than decided in the heat of an open trade.
5) Position sizing rules — your risk percentage per trade and the formula you use to translate that into an actual lot size.
6) Daily and weekly loss limits — the specific thresholds that, once hit, mean you stop trading regardless of how the next setup looks.
7) Review and journaling process — how and when you'll actually analyze your performance, rather than just accumulating data you never look at again.
If any single one of these sections is missing from your written plan, you don't yet have a complete plan — you have a partial one, and the missing piece is very often exactly where things eventually go wrong.
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