Your plan says "be patient" and "only take A+ setups". On Tuesday you take four trades. Were you patient? Was the third one an A+ setup? You can argue either way, so the plan has nothing to say about Tuesday.
Change the plan to "I wait for the candle to close before I enter" and "at most 3 trades a day". You can check every trade against the first rule, and Tuesday breaks the second.
What goes in a trading plan
A plan does not need to be long. It needs to cover the decisions you make every day, written before the day starts.
What and when. The symbols you trade, the days you trade, and the hours you take trades in.
Risk. The most you risk on one trade, whether every trade has a stop-loss, and the lowest planned reward-to-risk you accept.
Your day. The most trades you take in a day, the loss where you stop for the day, how many losses in a row stop you, how long you wait after a loss, and the profit where a good day ends.
Before you enter. What has to be true before you take a trade, and the times you don't trade at all, such as around a news release.
In the trade. How you manage a trade once you are in: where your stop-loss may move, when you take part off, what you never do.
Your setups. Each setup you trade, by name, with what makes a trade that setup.
Write rules you can check
A rule should have two answers: kept or broken. "Be patient" has no answer. "I wait for the candle to close" does. When you write a rule, ask yourself whether you could answer it from your journal a week later.
Put a number in it where you can. "Don't overtrade" becomes "at most 3 trades a day". "Cut losses" becomes "every trade has a stop-loss, and I never move it further away".
Name the action, not the feeling. "Stay calm after a loss" is hard to check. "After a loss, I wait 30 minutes before the next trade" is easy.
Keep the list short, short enough to read in one minute before the session. Start with the rules that cover your largest losses, and add more once you keep those.
Check yourself against it
The check is simple: after every trade, mark each rule kept or broken. Then, every week or two, count.
For each rule, count how often you broke it, and what the trades where you broke it made against the trades where you kept it. Say this is your log for "I wait for the candle to close" over 40 trades:
- Kept on 31 trades, +0.30R on average, +9.3R in total.
- Broken on 9 trades, −0.45R on average, −4.05R in total.
You broke the rule on 9 of 40 trades, fewer than a quarter. Those 9 trades lost 4.05R, close to half of the 9.3R the kept trades made, so this is the rule to work on first.
Reading the count carefully
Small counts can mislead. Nine broken trades can lose on average by chance. Keep counting before you decide the rule matters, and look at how many trades each average rests on.
A broken rule can still win. If you enter early and the trade works, the rule still counts as broken. Mark it honestly. The count only works if a winning trade can break a rule too.
Leaving a rule blank is not keeping it. If you skip the mark on the trades you would rather not judge, the broken count shrinks and the plan looks better kept than it is.
A rule you always keep can stay on the list. It may be easy for you, or it may simply be right, and keeping it costs you nothing. A rule you break every day is a different question: it may not describe how you trade, or it may be the most important rule you have.
When to change your plan
Change it between sessions, not during one, when you can look at your count and not only at your last trade.
Change it from your count. If you break a rule on many trades and those trades do no worse than the kept ones, it may not belong in your plan. A risk rule, such as a stop-loss on every trade, is different: it limits a loss your count may not have seen yet, so keep it.
Write down why you changed it, with the date. A month later you can compare the trades before and after the change.
How Vink helps
Your plan from questions. Open Trading plan and click Start. Vink asks up to fifteen questions in six groups: what and when, risk, your day, before you enter, in the trade, and your setups. Every question can be skipped. Vink turns your answers into rules, and the setups you name become your Setups tags.
Rules Vink checks, and rules you tick. Each rule is marked "Vink checks" or "You tick". Vink checks the rules it can measure from a trade, such as your symbols, hours, risk, stop-loss and trades per day. The rules about your entries and how you manage a trade appear as a checklist under "Your plan" on the trade form: tap a rule once for kept, twice for broke, or click "All kept".
Your rule, shown back. When you log a trade dated today and it breaks a rule Vink checks, a small note shows the rule and one fact, for example "This trade has no stop." Each rule speaks at most once a day.
The count, per rule. In Stats, "Do I keep my plan?" lists every rule with how often you kept it, how often you broke it, and the average R of each. Its answer names the rule you broke on the most trades, for example "broken on 9 of 40", with the average R when broken and when kept. There is no single plan score.
Your plan before the trade. Your plan shows on the dashboard under "Your plan", in your weekly review, and in the tilt check before a new trade, with today's limits next to it.
The boundary
Vink never blocks a trade. It cannot reach your broker, and the note comes after you log a trade, not before you take it. The rules you tick are yours to judge, and Vink counts what you mark. It keeps your plan in front of you and counts, rule by rule, how the trades that kept it did against the trades that broke it.
Write each rule so a trade can keep it or break it, mark every trade, and count per rule what the broken trades cost. Change the plan between sessions, from that count.