Trading Plan Generator

A trading plan is a written set of rules, decided in advance, that governs how you trade. A complete plan has eleven parts: the markets and instruments you trade; the session or time window you trade in; the capital allocated to trading; the risk per trade as a fixed fraction of that capital; a maximum daily loss cap; a maximum number of concurrent positions; a maximum weekly loss or circuit-breaker rule; the entry criteria that define a valid setup; the stop rule that defines where the idea is wrong; the exit rule that defines where you take profit; the position-sizing rule that turns the stop distance into a quantity; a review cadence; and a set of personal discipline rules such as no revenge trading and no adding to losers. The point of writing it down is that every one of these is a decision better made when you are flat and calm than in the middle of a moving position, and a written rule is the only version of the decision that survives the moment.

Work top down, from capital to conduct. First fix the capital you are willing to allocate and treat it as the whole account for sizing. Second, set the risk per trade as a fixed fraction of that capital, conventionally 0.5 to 1 percent. Third, set a daily loss cap and a weekly loss cap as fractions of capital, and note the number of losing trades that reaches the daily cap, which is the daily cap divided by the per-trade risk. Fourth, cap the number of positions you will hold at once. Fifth, write the entry criteria that make a setup valid, in terms specific enough that another person could apply them. Sixth, write the stop rule, the place the idea is wrong, and the exit rule for taking profit. Seventh, write the position-sizing rule that converts the stop distance into a quantity. Eighth, set a review cadence, daily or weekly. Last, list the personal rules that stop known mistakes, then generate the plan, print it, and keep it where you place orders. The generator on this page walks you through exactly these steps and prints the result.

The fixed-fractional convention is 0.5 to 1 percent of capital per trade, with 2 percent as an outer bound reserved for the highest-conviction setups and never a default. A daily loss cap is commonly set at two to three times the per-trade risk, so a run of two or three full-sized losses ends the session rather than a spiral. On a 5,00,000 account risking 1 percent, per-trade risk is 5,000 and a 3 percent daily cap is 15,000, which is three losing trades. The exact numbers are yours to choose, but the caps should agree with each other: a daily cap smaller than a single trade's risk is unusable, and a daily cap that several simultaneous positions can breach in one adverse move is not really a cap. These are limits computed from your own inputs, not a prediction of results.

It is a division, not a judgement: the number of full-sized losing trades that reaches the daily cap equals the daily loss cap divided by the per-trade risk. At 1 percent risk with a 3 percent daily cap, that is three trades; at 1 percent with a 2 percent cap, two trades; at 0.5 percent with a 3 percent cap, six trades. This number, which the generator calls trades to stop, is the practical meaning of the daily cap, because it tells you how many times you can be wrong before you are done for the day. It is worth choosing deliberately: too small and one bad patch shuts you out of a good afternoon, too large and the cap stops protecting you from a full tilt spiral. Setting it at two to four is common for discretionary traders.

Because the version of you that knows the rules and the version that is in a losing position are not the same decision-maker. Every rule in a plan is a decision that gets made twice: once when you are flat and calm and can reason about it, and again in the moment when money is moving and urgency, fear and the need to be right take over. A written, pre-committed rule is simply the calm decision recorded so the heated one cannot quietly overrule it. This is not a motivational point, it is the entire mechanism: the plan converts in-the-moment impulses into rules decided in advance, and its value is exactly the difference between what you would do calmly and what you would do under pressure. Knowing the rules is not the same as having pre-committed to them, in the same way that knowing a diet is not the same as not keeping the dessert in the house.

A daily circuit breaker is a rule that stops you trading for the rest of the session once your losses for the day reach a set amount, regardless of how you feel about the next setup. It exists because losses do not stay independent: after a couple of them, the pressure to make the money back changes how you size and what you take, and that tilt, not the original losses, is what turns a normal down day into a large one. Setting the cap as a fixed fraction of capital, then converting it to the number of losing trades it represents, makes the rule concrete: at the third loss on a three-trade cap you are done, no discretion. The hard part is not designing the breaker, it is obeying it on the one afternoon it matters, which is why it belongs in writing and is worth pairing with a personal rule to stand down at the cap.

Yes, and it is one of the most common quiet flaws in a plan. If you allow four concurrent positions each risking 1 percent, your open risk when all four are on is 4 percent, but if your daily loss cap is 3 percent, a single adverse move that stops all four out breaches the cap by a whole percent in one sweep. The per-trade risk multiplied by the maximum positions is the most the book can lose at once, and if that product is larger than the daily cap, the two rules disagree and the cap cannot actually hold. The generator on this page checks exactly this and flags it: either reduce the position count, reduce the per-trade risk, or raise the daily cap so the numbers are consistent. Correlated positions make it worse, because several trades in the same theme behave like one larger bet that stops together.

A plan needs two review loops on different clocks. The fast loop is a short daily or per-session review of whether you followed the plan, kept separate from whether you made money, because a losing trade taken correctly is a good trade and a winning trade taken against the plan is a bad one. The slow loop is a weekly or monthly review of the plan itself against your journal: which rules were repeatedly broken, which setups actually paid, whether the caps were too tight or too loose. Without the slow loop a plan calcifies and you keep applying rules that stopped fitting; without the fast loop you never notice that you are not applying them at all. A plan with no review cadence set is the single most common reason a plan quietly stops being used, which is why the generator flags it when you leave it blank.

No. A plan does not predict the market and no plan can promise a profit; it constrains your behaviour, which is a different and more modest thing. What a plan does is make your risk bounded and your decisions repeatable, so that a genuine edge has room to show up over many trades and a bad patch cannot end the account before it does. The SEBI FY25 study found that over 91 percent of individual traders in the equity derivatives segment were net loss-making, with aggregate net losses of about 1,05,603 crore rupees, and the losing behaviour it describes, oversizing, revenge trading, no stop, no limit on the damage of a bad day, is precisely the behaviour a written plan is built to prevent. The plan is not an edge in itself; it is the container that lets an edge survive long enough to matter, and its absence is one of the cheapest mistakes to fix.