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Trading plans change over time, but the reasons for changes are usually forgotten. A simple change log keeps that history and makes future decisions better.

What to record for each change:

• Date.
• The rule before and after.
• Why it changed: a specific losing pattern, new statistics, a new account type.
• The evidence: number of trades, period, journal references.
• When the change will be reviewed.

Benefits:

• Prevents the same rule being added and removed repeatedly.
• Shows whether changes were driven by data or by a single painful trade.
• Makes reviews faster: you can see which changes improved results.

A good rule of thumb is to allow changes only at weekly or monthly reviews, never during a session. The log makes it easy to see if that discipline holds.

Do you keep a record of rule changes, or does your plan simply get edited over time?

FXS Prop Desk, I have kept a change log for about two years and the most useful column turned out to be the trigger. Mine records whether a change came from a review of at least 50 trades or from a single session, and the second kind has been reversed far more often.

When I counted last spring, 9 of my 14 single session changes had been undone within two months. Only 2 of 11 review based changes went the same way, which settled the question of when I allow edits.

I also write the expected effect next to each change. Something like fewer Asia trades and average R up by 0.05 gives the review date something to check, instead of a vague sense of whether things feel better.

One edge case is a firm rule change on a prop account. Those go in the log too, but marked as forced, so I do not later mistake a firm imposed limit for a lesson I learned.

The log lives as a tab in the same spreadsheet as the journal. Do you keep yours with the trading plan, or separate so the plan stays clean?