Your First Trading Plan — Seven Sections, and the Two That Do the Work

A plan is something you can read back, not something you intend

The whole video hangs on one distinction: a decision made in advance and written down behaves differently from the same decision made in the moment.

The analogy he opens with is a good one. "Saying 'I want to make money' is like walking into a gym and saying 'I want to get fit'. Cool. How? By when? What's your plan?" An objective with no mechanism attached is not a plan, and it produces no different behaviour from having no objective at all.

Note what the seven sections have in common: each one converts a recurring live decision into a decision already made. That is the mechanism. Not motivation, not discipline — fewer decisions available to you when it matters, which is the same argument made from a different direction in what a complete trading system requires.

Section one: a goal you can fail, and at least one that is not about money

"Grow my $500 account by 2% a week over the next 6 months" is a goal. "I want to get rich" is not, because nothing about it is checkable on any particular day.

The strongest suggestion in this section is the one that is not about returns at all: "follow my trading plan for 20 straight trades with no emotion. That one, that's the one that changed everything for me."

This is worth more than the percentage target, and for a reason the video does not spell out. A returns target is not under your control and a process target is. Whether you make 2% next week depends largely on the market; whether you followed your own rules for twenty trades depends entirely on you. Setting only the first kind guarantees you will judge yourself on something you cannot steer.

Sections two and three: pick a style that fits your week, then two instruments

"Trading isn't about copying someone else's pace." The four styles differ mainly in how much screen time they demand, and picking one that does not fit your schedule is a decision to break your own plan later.

His recommendation for beginners is swing trading, and the reasoning is about capacity rather than profitability: "it gives you time to think, time to plan, and time to breathe. Perfect if you work a job or only have evenings free." That is the right axis to choose on. Nothing about a shorter timeframe makes it more profitable, and everything about it makes it more demanding.

On instruments, the rule is two: "there are over 60 currency pairs. You only need two." Majors first, for tight spreads and liquidity, and stay there for six to twelve months. The argument is that each instrument has behaviour you can only learn by watching it repeatedly, and watching fifteen means learning none of them.

Sections four and five: rules a stranger could follow

"If your entry isn't written down like a recipe, you're not trading, you're guessing." His worked example: buy when price is above the 200 moving average, RSI is below 30, and price bounces off a support zone — and if all three are not true, there is no trade.

Treat that specific combination as an illustration of the shape of a rule, not as a recommendation. What makes it a good example is that it is falsifiable: three conditions, each of which is either met or not, with no room for "close enough". Whether those three conditions have an edge on your instrument is a separate question that only your own testing can answer.

The exit half is where he is bluntest, and correctly so: "if you don't know when to get out, the market will make the decision for you, and it won't be pretty." Both levels — target and stop — get set before the position exists, and both are derived from the chart rather than from how the trade feels once you are in it.

Section six: the only section that decides whether you survive

"Risk management isn't sexy, but it's what keeps you alive when the market punches you in the mouth." Four rules, and all four are worth adopting exactly as stated.

1. 1Never risk more than 1% of the account on one trade. On a $500 account that is $5 — deliberately small, because the objective is staying in the game rather than making this month interesting.
2. 2Always use a stop, placed at a level that means something. Just beyond the most recent swing high or low, so the price that takes you out is a price that invalidates the idea, not a round number.
3. 3Know your risk-to-reward before entering. At 1:2, four winners in ten is enough to be profitable — "you don't have to win every trade."
4. 4Size the position with a calculator, not by eye. Account size, risk amount and stop distance determine the lot size. "Sizing too big is how beginners blow up on one trade."

The fifth rule is the one most plans omit: a weekly cap. Three losses in a row, or 5% of the account gone in a week, and you stop for the week. Not a suggestion to be careful — a stopping condition, decided now, that does not require the version of you who just lost three trades to make an accurate judgement about themselves.

Section seven and the step everyone skips: routine, then testing

"Most traders lose not because their strategy is bad, but because their routine is lazy." His routine is five lines: check the calendar, mark the charts, wait for the setup, take the trade, log it.

The journal is the part with compounding value. Not just the entry, exit and result, but the state you were in: whether you felt confident, rushed or unsure. His framing — "the journal isn't for bragging, it's your mirror" — points at the right use, which is the weekly pattern rather than the individual trade. Did the Friday-afternoon trades lose? Did the ones you waited for do better than the ones you took immediately?

The distinction between the first two rungs is the important one. Backtesting tests the plan; forward testing on demo tests you. "It's not live money, but it's live action. And that means it tests your mindset. Can you stick to the plan when the market's moving fast?" Those are two different failure modes, and skipping the second is how a well-researched plan still produces a blown account.

One refinement rule is worth extracting: change one thing at a time. "Update one rule at a time. Test again, and then repeat." Change three rules after a bad month and you have learned nothing about any of them.

The statistics, and two gaps

The structure is sound and the risk section is genuinely good. Three things should be handled carefully before you pass any of it on.

The numbers have no source. "Over 70% of new traders lose money" and "71% of new traders quit within the first year" are both stated as established facts, and neither is attributed. Figures in this range do circulate — broker disclosures in some jurisdictions are required to publish loss rates for retail derivatives accounts, and they are high — but a precise, unsourced percentage in a beginner video is a rhetorical device, not evidence. The advice attached to them does not need them: writing a plan down is worth doing whether the true figure is 70% or 55%.

There is no expectancy step. The plan tells you to test until "you're winning more than you're losing" and your average win exceeds your average loss, which is the right check. But there is nothing about how many trades make that check meaningful. Twenty results tell you almost nothing; the video's own suggestion of 20 to 50 backtested trades is the floor, not a comfortable sample. Treat a passing result on thirty trades as permission to test further, not as a green light.

Costs never appear. Spreads, commissions, swap and slippage are absent from every example, including the backtest instructions. On a swing plan targeting a couple of percent a week, costs are a rounding error; on the scalping style he lists first, they can be most of the edge. Any backtest that ignores them is measuring a strategy nobody can actually trade.