Trading plan: rules for the future
A trading plan defines, in advance, the conditions you’ll enter under, where you’ll place stops and targets, and how many trades you’ll allow yourself per day or week. By definition, it’s written before you enter the market.
Without a plan, every decision gets made in the heat of the moment — and that produces inconsistent results.
Trading journal: a record of the past
A journal does the opposite — it records what already happened. The actual balance you entered with, the leverage you used, and the outcome.
The relationship between the two is simple: plan it, execute it, log it, then review the log to refine the plan.
Questions that connect the two
- Did today’s trade actually match the conditions in my plan?
- If I broke the plan, why — emotion, missing information, or a genuine exception?
- Looking at this month’s log, which part of the plan gets broken most often?
A plan without a journal is only half the system
No matter how carefully crafted your trading plan is, you have no way to verify it without logging the results of executing it. Only the journal tells you whether the plan is working — or whether the plan itself needs to change.
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