A written trading plan, and the weekly review that checks it

What a written plan usually contains

Plans vary by trader and market, but most written plans cover the same few questions. What is traded, which setups qualify, how much can be lost on one trade and in one day, and when no trading happens at all. The common thread is that each line can later be answered with a yes or a no. “Trade well” cannot be checked; “no new position after the day’s losses reach $500” can.

A plan written this way also has a fixed date. A plan that says “two setups only: an opening-range break and a pullback to the prior day’s low” is a statement about that day or week. Changing it halfway through a session is itself something the review records.

• Instruments: for example ES and MES only.
• Setups: a short named list, each with the conditions that define it.
• Risk per trade: a cash cap, with the stop placed at entry.
• Daily limit: a cash loss after which no new positions are opened.
• No-trade conditions: for example the 30 minutes around a scheduled data release.

From a risk cap to a contract count

A cash risk cap only means something once it is converted into contracts. CME Group’s contract specifications give the conversion. The E-mini S&P 500 is $50 times the S&P 500 index, with a minimum fluctuation of 0.25 index points, worth $12.50. The Micro E-mini S&P 500 is $5 times the index, with the same 0.25-point tick, worth $1.25.

So a stop X points from the entry price costs X × $50 per ES and X × $5 per MES, before fees and any slippage. The number of contracts a cap allows is the cap divided by the cost per contract, rounded down.

Take a hypothetical plan with a $25,000 account, a cap of $250 a trade (1% of that account) and a stop placed a quarter of the 14-session average true range away. These inputs are invented for the example and are not recommendations. The range figure is real: we took Yahoo Finance daily bars for the December 2026 E-mini contract (ESZ26) for the 14 sessions from 30 September to 19 October 2026. Each session’s true range is the largest of the high minus the low, the high minus the prior close, and the prior close minus the low. The 14 true ranges add up to 1,138.50 points, and 1,138.50 ÷ 14 = 81.32 points. A quarter of that is 20.33 points, which rounds up to the next 0.25 tick at 20.50 points.

At 20.50 points, one ES risks 20.50 × $50 = $1,025, four times the cap, so the plan allows no ES. One MES risks 20.50 × $5 = $102.50. $250 ÷ $102.50 = 2.44, so the cap allows two MES, a planned risk of $205. Counted in ticks, the same stop is 82 ticks, and 82 × $1.25 = $102.50. Our Trading process section (/articles/section/trading-process) has a separate piece on the Turtle “N” method, which covers how range-based stops have been used historically; the point here is only that the written cap, not the moment, decides the size.

What a review against the plan measures

A review compares each trade with the plan that was in force when it was placed. Three measures appear in most review templates.

Plan adherence is the share of trades, or of rule checks, that followed the written rules. It is a process figure: a trade can follow every rule and lose, or break one and win.

Outcomes in R multiples express each result as a multiple of the risk planned at entry. With 1R = $205 in the MES example, a $410 gain is +2R and a full stop-out is −1R. R puts trades of different sizes, and different weeks, on one scale, and it shows when a loss was larger than the planned risk, which a dollar total hides.

Setups not taken are the qualifying setups that appeared and were skipped. Recording them, with the R they were planned for, separates hesitation from discipline: a skipped setup that matched the plan is a different event from a skipped setup that broke a no-trade condition.

A ten-trade review, invented for illustration

The week below did not happen. The trades, the results and the skipped setups are made up to show the arithmetic, and they say nothing about how any real strategy performs.

Seven of the ten trades followed every rule, so trade-level adherence is 7 ÷ 10 = 70%. The seven that followed the plan returned +1.5 − 1 + 2 − 1 − 1 + 0.8 + 1.2 = +2.5R, an average of +0.36R. The three that broke a rule returned −1.6 + 0.5 − 1 = −2.1R, an average of −0.70R. The week as a whole came to +0.4R, or +0.04R a trade.

The −1.6R trade stands out in R terms: the stop was moved wider after entry, so the loss was larger than the risk the plan allowed. The +0.5R trade was a win on a setup that was not in the plan; a dollar-only review would count it as a success. The same week had four qualifying setups that were seen and not taken, planned at 2, 1.5, 2 and 2.5R. Their average planned R is 8 ÷ 4 = 2.0R. Planned R is not a result, and a review that adds it to the week’s total would be counting trades that never existed.

How the PYE Markets journal records a plan and a review

The PYE Markets journal at /journal keeps both halves in one place. A pre-market plan has fields for a bias, the instruments, key levels, the planned setups, “no trade if” conditions and a maximum loss in a chosen currency. Separate entry types cover a week-ahead prep, with goals and risk limits, and a weekly recap that marks each goal as achieved or not.

A review entry builds its “Did I follow my plan?” checklist from the plan’s own fields: one line for the bias, the setups, the key levels, each no-trade condition and the maximum loss. Two of those lines are checked automatically from the logged trades. The maximum-loss line compares the day’s logged P&L in the plan’s currency with the plan’s limit, and the setups line compares each trade’s setup tag with the plan’s list. The trader can override either mark, and the automatic mark is kept beside the trader’s own, so an override stays visible.

Trades can be linked to a saved, named setup with its own checklist of rules, ticked for that trade, and the statistics group trades by those setups with the share of checklist items ticked. A setup seen and skipped is logged as “not taken”, with its planned R and a reason; it carries no P&L and appears only under “Setups not taken”. The statistics report plan adherence as the share of marked review items followed, and compare days on plan with days off plan, and days with a written plan with days without one. Results can be shown in dollars, R multiples, percent of account, or a process-only view with no results at all.

Two rules keep the record honest. Entries are forward only: they can be dated today, or the previous session until the next open, and trade times cannot be later than the time of entry. A saved entry can be edited for 15 minutes and then locks; after that only dated follow-up notes can be added. Every journal route is limited to the signed-in owner, and the private setups that can be attached to an entry are visible only to that owner.

Check the numbers yourself

The contract terms are on CME Group’s contract-specification pages for the E-mini S&P 500 and the Micro E-mini S&P 500, under “Contract Unit” and “Minimum Price Fluctuation”. The range figure can be rebuilt from Yahoo Finance’s daily history for ESZ26: list the high, low and close for 29 September to 19 October 2026, compute each true range from 30 September onward, and average the 14 values. Ours is a simple average; a Wilder-smoothed ATR, which many charting packages use by default, gives a slightly different number. The 20 October session was still trading when we fetched the bars, so the window ends on 19 October. Our lesson on risk first (/learn/risk-first) covers the per-trade arithmetic in more general terms.

General market information, not investment advice.