Glossary
What is a trading plan?
A trading plan is the written set of rules you trade by — your setups, entry triggers, stop placement, position sizing, and exit logic — specific enough that you can later check, trade by trade, whether you actually followed it.
Definition
A useful trading plan is a collection of discrete, named plays rather than a vague intention. "Trade breakouts with good risk-reward" cannot be checked against anything; "breakout-retest: enter on the retest hold, stop under the level, fixed risk per trade, exit at the prior high" can. The test of a good plan is whether a reasonable person could look at a trade and the plan and say compliant or not.
A plan also covers the session frame, not just the setups: a daily loss limit, a maximum number of trades, and the readiness check that decides whether you should trade at all today. Those guardrails are decided before the open, when judgment is clearest, so the session is for executing decisions rather than making them.
Why it matters
A plan you do not track is a wish
Plans rarely fail loudly — they drift. A stop moved just this once, an entry a tick early, a setup traded in conditions the plan excluded. Each deviation is small enough to excuse, and a quarter later you are running a strategy nobody ever wrote down. The drift is invisible because nothing measures it; P&L mixes plan trades and improvisations into one number.
Tracking makes the comparison explicit. In Mettle you write each setup as a play in the playbook and tag every journaled trade back to the play it was meant to follow, so plan-versus-actual is a built-in view rather than a weekend spreadsheet. Deviations get recorded as behavioral tags at the moment you notice them — self-reported, because only you know you widened the stop.
Example
Finding the drift in the numbers
Twelve trades on one play this month; the journal shows the stop was widened on four of them, and those four account for most of the play's losses. Without per-trade tags this reads as "the play is getting worse." With them it reads as what it is — the trader is no longer following one rule — and the fix is obvious.
Related terms
Put your plan where your trades are
Write your plays in Mettle's playbook, tag every journaled trade back to its play, and see plan-versus-actual each week without building a spreadsheet. Free to start, no card.
Start free — no cardMore terms
New to journaling? Read our guide on how to journal trades.