ORB Trading Plan
The opening range breakout plan treated as an actual document. What earns a place on a single page, when a revision is legitimate rather than improvised, and why rules about behaviour beat targets for results.
A Plan Is a Document or It Is Nothing
Traders talk about having a plan the way people talk about having a diet, which is to say loosely, and mostly as a description of intent. A plan that exists only as a set of intentions cannot be broken, because there is nothing specific enough to break. Writing it down changes its nature. Once the rules occupy a page, they can be read back, compared against what actually happened, and revised on purpose rather than drifting. The document is not a formality wrapped around the strategy. For an opening range breakout, it is most of the strategy.
One Page Is Usually the Right Length
Long plans are not more rigorous, they are less used. A document you have to scroll through will not be consulted at the open, and a rule that is not consulted is not in force. The useful constraint is fitting the whole thing on a single readable page, which forces every line to earn its position. What survives that cut tends to be the operative material, the range period, the entry condition, the stop, the size, the daily ceiling and the conditions under which no trade is taken. What gets cut tends to be commentary.
Rules, Not Aspirations
The most common defect in a written plan is that it contains hopes dressed as instructions. A line saying you will be patient is not checkable. A line specifying the period the range is measured over, and that entry requires a close beyond the edge rather than a touch, is checkable at a glance by someone who was not there. If a rule cannot be evaluated after the fact by reading the chart and the plan side by side, it is not a rule, and it will not survive contact with a session that tempts you.
Changing It Is Allowed, Improvising Is Not
A plan that never changes has stopped learning, and a plan that changes weekly was never a plan. The distinction that matters is not how often it is revised but when. Revisions made away from the market, on a schedule, with a reason recorded, are how a document improves. Revisions made during a session, in response to a trade currently running, are simply improvisation with a paper trail. The same edit can be either one depending only on the moment it is made.
Building the Document Itself
The articles here treat the trading plan as an artefact to be written, maintained and read, rather than as a synonym for having thought about the market. They cover what belongs on a single page, how often the page should be allowed to change and what a legitimate revision looks like, and why a plan describing outcomes is a wish list while a plan describing behaviour is an instrument. Entries, risk arithmetic and range analysis are handled elsewhere.
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A Plan Describes Behavior, Not Results
2026-09-03
Open a dozen trading plans and a good number of them will open with a figure. A monthly target, an annual return, a daily amount the trader intends to make. It reads like seriousness. It is actually the point at which the document stops being a plan, because everything that follows is now organised around a quantity nobody in the room controls.
You Control Inputs and Nothing Else
The strategy produces outcomes through a market that is indifferent to your intentions. What you actually control is which sessions you participate in, what conditions have to be present before you act, where the stop goes, how large the position is, and when you stop for the day. Those are all behaviours. The profit is a consequence of running those behaviours across enough sessions, and it arrives unevenly regardless of how well they are run.
Writing a target into the plan asserts authority over the part you do not hold. Worse, it creates a standing conflict, because on any day the target is not being met the document itself is quietly asking you to do something different from what your rules say.
The Failure Mode of a Results Based Plan
Consider how a daily profit target behaves in practice. Reach it early and the rules now argue for stopping, even on a session where conditions are unusually favourable. Fall short by mid morning and the rules argue for taking a trade you would otherwise skip, or for holding one past the exit, or for sizing up to close the gap.
In both directions the target overrides the strategy, and it overrides it in the way that most damages the results it was supposed to produce. The trades that get cut are good ones and the trades that get added are marginal ones. A document with a number at the top has built that in from the first line.
Behaviour Can Be Graded, Outcomes Cannot
There is a practical reason to prefer behavioural rules beyond the psychology. They make review possible. At the end of a session you can ask, for each trade, whether the entry condition was actually met, whether the stop went where the plan said, whether the size came from the arithmetic, and whether you stopped when you were meant to. Each of those has a yes or no answer that the chart and the plan can settle between them.
An outcome cannot be graded the same way. A profitable session might have come from a rule break that happened to work, and a losing one might represent perfect execution. If the plan is written in terms of results, the review has nothing to examine except the account balance, which is the one piece of information that tells you least about whether the process is sound.
Where Numbers Do Belong
None of this argues against measurement. It argues about which numbers live in which document. The plan holds the numbers that define behaviour, the range period, the risk fraction, the session ceiling. The record holds the numbers that describe what happened, and it is read at review time rather than during a session.
Keeping them apart means the trading document contains nothing that can pressure a decision, and the performance document contains nothing that can be acted on in the moment. That separation is more useful than it sounds, because the material that helps you assess a strategy over months is the same material that corrupts a decision made in a minute.
Rewriting a Wish as an Instruction
Most result oriented lines can be converted with a little work. An intention to be more selective becomes a specific condition that must be present before an entry is taken. An intention to lose less becomes a stated session ceiling and a stated risk fraction. An intention to stop overtrading becomes a maximum number of attempts per session, written down, with the count kept somewhere visible.
The converted version is duller and considerably more useful. It also has a property the original lacked, which is that you can fail it clearly. A wish cannot be broken, so it offers nothing to hold on to. A behavioural rule can be broken, and knowing precisely when you broke it is the beginning of everything the plan was written to do.
How Often a Plan Should Be Allowed to Change
2026-09-03
Two failure modes sit at opposite ends of the same question. One trader has carried the same document for years and defends it against every piece of contrary evidence. Another rewrites theirs after any session that disappoints. Both are avoiding the same difficulty, which is that a written plan is a claim about how a strategy should be run, and claims have to be revisable without being disposable.
The Timing of the Edit Decides Whether It Is Legitimate
The single most useful discipline is separating the moment of revision from the moment of trading. A change made on a weekend, with the week's records in front of you and no position open, is a revision. The identical change made at ten in the morning with a trade going against you is an improvisation, and the fact that it was typed into the document does not launder it.
This is worth stating in the plan itself. A line specifying that the document may not be edited during market hours costs nothing to include and removes the most damaging category of change entirely. It also makes the rule visible, so that when you find yourself wanting to edit mid session you at least know what you are doing.
Reviews on a Schedule, Not on a Feeling
Fixing a review interval solves most of the frequency problem by itself. A short weekly pass that only asks whether the rules were followed, and a longer periodic pass that asks whether the rules are any good, keeps the two questions apart. Conflating them is how a trader ends up changing a sound rule because they broke it, which is the wrong repair for that particular fault.
Between reviews, observations go into a list rather than into the document. Most of them will look less compelling a week later, which is exactly the filter you want. The ones that still look compelling have survived the emotional context that generated them, and those are the candidates worth considering.
How Much Evidence a Change Should Require
The honest answer is more than feels necessary. A single session tells you almost nothing about a rule, because the range of normal outcomes for any strategy comfortably contains sessions that look like the rule failed. Changing after one is fitting the document to noise, and doing that repeatedly produces a plan that describes recent history rather than a method.
A reasonable bar is that the same problem has appeared repeatedly, in circumstances you can describe, and that you can state what the change is supposed to fix before you make it. If you cannot articulate the failure the edit addresses, you are not improving the plan. You are relieving discomfort.
Some Changes Are Not Really Changes
It helps to distinguish between amending a rule and clarifying one. Discovering that your plan never specified whether the range is measured on bodies or wicks, and writing down the answer you have been using all along, is not a revision. It is closing a gap, and it should be done immediately rather than waiting for a review, because the gap is where discretion leaks in.
Genuine amendments change what you would do in a situation you have already faced. Those deserve the full process. Clarifications change nothing about your behaviour and only make the document match it, and treating the two the same way makes people reluctant to fix obvious holes.
Keep the Old Versions
A plan with no history is difficult to learn from, because you lose the ability to ask when a rule arrived and what it replaced. Dating each version and keeping the previous ones, with a line explaining why the change was made, turns the document into a record of your own reasoning rather than a snapshot of current opinion.
The value shows up later, usually when a rule starts to feel arbitrary and the temptation is to drop it. Being able to read why it was added, and what went wrong before it existed, is often enough to answer the question. It also exposes the pattern where a rule is removed, reinstated after a bad stretch, and removed again, which is a cycle that is nearly invisible without a version history and obvious with one.
What Belongs in a One Page Trading Plan
2026-09-03
The length of a trading plan is inversely related to how often it is opened. A document running to many pages is written once, admired briefly, and then never consulted at the moment it was meant to govern. A single page is different, because a single page can be read in the minute before the session starts, which is the only reading that changes anything.
The Test Every Line Has to Pass
Before deciding what goes on the page, it helps to have a filter. The one that works is whether a person who was not present could take your plan and your chart, look at a completed session, and say without hesitation whether you followed the rules. If the answer requires knowing what you were thinking, the line is not a rule.
This filter removes a lot of material immediately. Lines about staying disciplined, avoiding revenge trades or waiting for good setups all fail it. They describe a state of mind rather than an action, and while the sentiment is correct, a document full of sentiment provides nothing to check against and nothing to break.
The Definitions Section
The first thing that belongs on the page is a set of definitions specific enough to be unambiguous at speed. Which instrument, which session, what period the opening range is measured over, and what counts as the range boundary. That last one is less obvious than it seems, since a range measured on candle bodies is a different range from one measured on wicks, and both are defensible until the day the difference decides whether you are in a trade.
Definitions also cover what constitutes a break. A touch, a close beyond the level, a hold above it for some period, all of these describe different strategies. Leaving it undefined means choosing in the moment, and the choice made in the moment will consistently favour taking the trade.
The Money Section
Second comes the risk material, which should be the least negotiable part of the document. Where the stop is placed as a matter of structure rather than preference, how position size is derived from that stop distance, the maximum the account may lose in a session, and whether a second trade is permitted after the first one fails.
These belong on the page even though they are also decided elsewhere, because the page is what gets read. A risk policy filed in a separate document is a risk policy that competes for attention with the market, and it loses.
The Conditions for Not Trading
The section most often missing is the one listing the circumstances under which no trade is taken. A scheduled release landing at or near the open. A range so far outside its normal height that the arithmetic no longer works. A session you are attending in a state that you have previously learned produces poor decisions.
Writing these down converts a skip from an act of restraint into an act of compliance, which is a much easier thing to perform. It also protects the record. Without the list, every day you sit out looks like hesitation when you review the month, and hesitation is uncomfortable enough that most traders eventually stop sitting out.
What Does Not Earn a Place
Market commentary does not belong on the page, because it dates immediately and the page does not. Neither does an explanation of why the strategy works. That reasoning is worth writing, and worth revisiting when results disappoint, but it belongs in a separate note. Mixing rationale with rules makes the rules harder to find and gives you something to argue with at exactly the wrong time.
Profit goals do not belong either. A target for the day or the month describes an outcome you do not control and introduces pressure into decisions that should be indifferent to how the month is going. The page should be readable on the best day of the year and the worst without saying anything different.
What remains after all that is short, slightly dull, and usable. A plan that reads as boring is a good sign. It means the interesting parts, the judgement and the reading of the session, have been left where they belong, which is in your head, operating inside a boundary the page has already drawn.
