Saturday, July 30, 2005
Trading Plan Template, by Tim Wilcox
One aspect of trading your own account is the freedom to make your own rules, keep your own hours, and be accountable to only yourself -- and your family-- which hopefully is the same thing! Along with that freedom is the absolute need to create a sufficiently structured environment for yourself. Self-discipline is hard won and severely tested when you are your own "boss". You must build your foundation brick by brick, layering good habits on well articulated goals and objectives, one of which is a good Trading Plan.
Coming from a corporate environment, this concept isn't hard for me to grasp. But I'll admit I kinda gag over the idea of making a "Mission" type statement. However, no need to get all legalese over it-- form it with a serious intent, but write it with the light-hearted, stress-free tone you'd like to have when trading. When I swing traded stocks, my trading plan was simple enough but I was aghast to discover how woefully out of date my "plan" had become over the past few years, as I made the transition to trading futures. I decided to start from the ground up.
There has been an explosion of such information on the web over the past year and my list of ideas was getting overwhelming. However, in my meanders, I discovered this
Trading Plan Template by Tim Wilcox(*) at the Trade2Win boards. Eureka! I am just now in the process of revamping my plan. Why not make one for yourself? Like other such plans, it is the process of creating and personalizing the specifics that is of greatest value. The plan is kept living with a regular monthly review, and updated as needed, when assessing your progress towards your goals and performace against your plans.
This time, I won't let it languish as long as I did before!
(*) Here is a
link to the original thread. There is also a Word document format of the plan, which may be more useful as a cut and paste template. The Word document is found on
Page 5 of the thread, 3rd post up from the bottom.
