Your Plan Should Include an "If This, Then That" Contingency Section

[Fairman]

Beyond your core entry and exit rules, a genuinely complete trading plan includes explicit answers to a handful of specific "what if" scenarios — decided in advance, in writing, while you're calm and thinking clearly, not improvised in real time under emotional pressure.

Work through these specific questions and write down your actual answers: What happens the moment I hit my daily loss limit — do I close the platform entirely, or just stop taking new trades while managing existing ones? What happens after three consecutive losing trades in a row, even if I haven't hit my full daily limit yet — do I pause, reduce size, or continue as normal? What happens during a major scheduled news event — do I close all positions beforehand, avoid opening new ones, or trade through it with adjusted sizing?

The value of deciding these answers in advance is worth emphasizing directly: in the actual moment these scenarios arise, you are, almost by definition, not in your calmest, clearest state of mind. You've just taken losses, or you're facing an uncertain news event, and that's precisely when your judgment is least reliable.

Having a pre-written answer removes the need to make a good decision under pressure — you just need to follow the decision your calmer self already made. This is one of the simplest, highest-value additions you can make to an existing trading plan, and it's the section most traders skip entirely, right up until the exact scenario it would have covered happens to them.