Futures Trading Plan Template: The One-Page Version That Gets Followed

Most trading plans are written once, admired briefly, and never opened again — because they are ten pages of philosophy when the trading day needs one page of decisions. A plan earns its existence by answering, faster than your impulses can: *do I take this trade, at what size, and when do I stop?*

Here is the one-page template, section by section, with the reasoning. It pairs with the journal template deliberately: the plan says what you intend, the journal proves what you did, and the review compares them.

Section 1 — The setups (your entire permission to trade)

List every setup you are allowed to trade — by name, with entry trigger, invalidation, and target logic. Three well-defined setups beat nine vague ones; most consistently profitable traders run shockingly few.

Example: *Failed breakout (NQ/MNQ):* range high taken and reclaimed within 2 bars → short on reclaim close; stop above the sweep high; first target = range midpoint.

The rule that gives this section teeth: if the trade you want to take has no name on this list, it does not exist. That single sentence, enforced by a setup-name column in your journal, eliminates most overtrading on its own.

Section 2 — Risk (numbers, not adjectives)

Four numbers, each derived — not felt:

• Risk per trade in dollars, sized from your stop distance (the arithmetic is in the

50K sizing guide).

• Personal daily stop, set *inside* your firm's

daily loss limit — half is a robust default — so a bad session ends while the account survives.

• Decision budget: maximum setups taken per session.
• Size cap, changeable only upward between sessions, never during one — size drift

mid-session is how funded accounts die.

Prop traders add one more line: *which account rules bind today* — remaining trailing room per account, flatten deadline, consistency constraints. The Topstep rulebook is the checklist version.

Section 3 — The schedule

When you trade, and — harder — when you do not: your windows, in your timezone, plus the standing exceptions (major news releases, half days). Derive the windows from your journal's time-of-day data rather than folklore, and revisit quarterly — the best-time-to-trade guide covers how to run that analysis.

Section 4 — The if-thens (decided while calm)

The plan's job is to pre-make the decisions that tilt will otherwise make for you:

- If I lose two trades in a row → 10-minute cooldown, size drops one notch. - If my personal daily stop hits → platform closed, session review only. - If I take a trade with no setup name → flagged, and it ends the session's decision budget. - If I am up 3R before 11:00 → one more A-setup maximum, then done.

These are the revenge-trading circuit breakers written into law before they are needed. An if-then you have to think about mid-session is not finished — each one should be executable by a stranger.

Section 5 — The review contract

One line: *ten minutes after every close, graded against this plan, ending in one correction.* The end-of-day routine is the procedure; the only plan-level decision is committing to it. A plan without a review contract is a wish — the review is what makes every other section falsifiable.

Keeping it alive

• Version it. Date each revision and change at most one thing at a time, between

sessions, with a journal reason attached. A plan edited mid-drawdown to permit the trade you want is not a plan; it is a permission slip.

• Grade adherence, not P&L. A losing week at 95% plan-adherence is a good week that got

bad variance. A winning week at 60% adherence is a warning. Your journal should score every session on-plan/off-plan — Propfy tracks the rule and size components automatically for prop accounts.

• Let the journal amend it. When the weekly review shows the same correction three weeks

running, that correction graduates into the plan. The plan is the slow, deliberate output of the journal's fast feedback.

Frequently asked questions

What should a futures trading plan include?

Five sections cover it on one page: named setups with triggers and invalidations, risk numbers (per-trade risk, a personal daily stop, a decision budget, a size cap), a trading schedule, if-then rules for losing streaks and tilt, and a standing commitment to a short daily review. Everything else is commentary.

How is a trading plan different from a trading journal?

The plan is written before the session and says what you intend; the journal is written during and after and records what you did. Neither works alone: a plan without a journal cannot be verified, and a journal without a plan has nothing to grade against. The daily review is the bridge where the two meet.

How long should a trading plan be?

One page. If it cannot be consulted in ten seconds mid-session, it will not be consulted at all. Depth belongs in your playbook notes and your journal history — the plan itself is the decision layer: setups, numbers, windows, if-thens.

Should prop firm traders have a different trading plan?

Same structure, two additions: the firm's binding rules (loss limits, trailing drawdown room, flatten deadline, consistency requirements) written into the risk section as today's actual numbers, and per-account context when trading multiple copied accounts — the plan sizes from the most constrained account, not the average.

Write it tonight, grade it tomorrow

One page, five sections, thirty minutes to draft. The plan will not be right the first time — that is what the journal is for. What matters is that from tomorrow, every trade is either on-plan or flagged, and the difference is finally measurable.