Notion trading plan template: copy, paste and check yourself against it

A plan you can paste into Notion in a minute, and a way to see whether you actually follow it.

Why write the plan before the journal

A journal can tell you whether you followed your plan only if the plan is written down. A vague plan cannot be broken, so it cannot be checked. Write it once, keep it short, and put a yes or no for "followed the plan" on every trade.

A trading plan you can paste into Notion

Copy the text below into a new Notion page. Notion turns the headings and lists into blocks. Replace the brackets with your own rules.

# Trading plan

## Markets and sessions
- I trade: [symbols]
- I trade only during: [sessions or hours, in broker server time]

## Setups (only these)
1. [Setup name]: entry [rule], stop [rule], target [rule]
2. [Setup name]: entry [rule], stop [rule], target [rule]

## Risk
- Risk per trade: [x]% of balance
- Maximum trades per day: [n]
- Daily loss limit: [x]%. I stop for the day when I reach it.
- Weekly loss limit: [x]%

## Before I trade (checklist)
- [ ] I checked the news calendar
- [ ] Is this one of my listed setups?
- [ ] Is my size within my rule?

## After a loss
- I pause for [minutes] before looking for another trade.
- I do not increase size to win it back.

## Review
- Daily: one line of notes per trade
- Weekly: 20 minutes, one change for next week
- Every 50 trades: recalculate win rate, profit factor, expectancy and drawdown

How to use the plan with your journal

• Add a Plan followed select (Yes or No) to your trades database.
• Each week, filter to No and read those trades together. Compare their results with the Yes trades.
• If a rule is broken often, either the rule is unrealistic or the trading around it needs work. Decide which and change one thing.

The free CSV in the free Notion trading journal template already includes a Plan Followed column. The revenge trading guide shows how the after-a-loss rule is checked against your data.

Make the numbers in your plan real

• Size trades from your stop distance with the position size calculator.
• Check your reward against risk with the risk to reward calculator.
• Set a daily loss limit you can actually live with; the drawdown recovery calculator shows why deep losses are costly.

Want the Trades database to fill itself? If you connect Notion, AI Trading Journal creates a daily database and a linked Trades database in your own Notion workspace and writes each closed MetaTrader 5 trade into them about every 5 minutes, with a Notes field it never overwrites. It is Windows-only and MT5-only, with a 7-day free trial and a one-time $19.99. Notion has no built-in link to MT5, so templates alone cannot do this.

This page is general education. The plan is a layout, not a recommendation of any strategy, and nothing here is trading or investment advice.

A filled-in example (hypothetical London pullback trader)

This is only an example of the layout. It is not a recommendation of any strategy, session or risk level.

How to choose limits that fit together

The numbers in a plan should be consistent with each other. If you risk 1% per trade and allow three losing trades before you stop, your daily loss limit should be about 3%. A limit of 1% with a risk of 1% means a single loss ends your day; a limit of 10% means you could take ten full losses in a day, which is far more than the plan intends. Check the arithmetic with the losing streak calculator to see how often a streak of that length will happen, and with the drawdown recovery calculator to see what it costs.

The last column shows why a weekly limit exists as well as a daily one: a few bad days in a row can add up quickly, and a weekly cap forces a pause before they do.

Common flaws in a trading plan

• Setups described in feelings. 'Looks strong' cannot be checked. Write the entry as a rule another person could follow.
• No limits. A plan with entries but no loss limit or trade cap lets one bad day run.
• Too many setups. Three or four at most. Each one needs its own sample of trades before you can judge it.
• Never updated. Review it each quarter against your journal. Delete rules that never matter and add rules for mistakes that keep recurring.
• Written once and never opened. Pin the page where you will see it before the first trade.

Linking the plan to the journal

Each section of the plan should have a matching field in your trade log: the setup name, the planned risk, the number of trades that day, and Plan followed. Without the matching field you cannot measure the rule. If a rule has no field, either add the field or drop the rule. For the checklist that goes with it, see the trading checklist template.

Frequently asked questions

Related guides

• A local trading journal for MT5
• P&L calendar for MT5
• Trade notes, ratings and screenshots
• Trading progress and goals
• Back up your journal and move it to a new PC
• An offline trading journal for Windows
• How to set monthly trading goals
• Import your whole MT5 history
• How to tag trades
• Trade screenshots for your journal
• All trading journal comparisons