How do you write a trading plan?

Answer four questions in writing: when you open a position, when you close it at a profit, when you close it at a loss, and how much you risk per trade. Add your capital, your chosen style, your routine, and what you will record for each trade. Keep it to one page. A plan you will actually follow beats a perfect plan you cannot stick to.

What is an example of a trading plan?

A swing example: trade BTC/USDT with 2 percent account risk per trade, enter long when price is above the 200-day EMA and four-hour RSI is below 40 at a support level, stop 2 percent below the entry candle low, take 50 percent profit at 1.5 times risk and the rest at 3 times risk, move the stop to breakeven after the first target, review the journal weekly. The five worked examples above cover DCA, swing, grid, part-time, and beginner versions in full.

What is the 3-5-7 rule in trading?

A position-sizing guide that caps concentration: no more than 3 percent of capital in any single trade, no more than 5 percent in any one market or asset, and no more than 7 percent at risk across all open positions at once. In crypto, where many assets move with Bitcoin, the 5 percent rule matters because seemingly separate positions are often correlated.

Can you make $1,000 a day with day trading?

It depends on account size and strategy performance. A 1 percent daily return on $100,000 is $1,000, which is achievable for disciplined systematic traders but takes years of practice and real capital. Beginners should focus on building a profitable strategy at small scale first. Someone who cannot make $50 consistently on a $5,000 account is not ready to target $1,000 a day.

How long does it take to build a working plan?

Expect four to eight weeks for the first version: one to two weeks on rules and self-assessment, two to three weeks of backtesting, and two to four weeks of paper trading. Then plan for three to six months of small live trading before you have enough real data to judge it properly. A plan is never finished; it improves continuously as you feed it real results.

Help center

How to build a crypto trading plan: Steps, checklist and trading plan examples

Bastien CapodagliReviewed by Nikolai Tovarnitski

CreatedJUN 18, 2026UpdatedJUN 18, 2026

A trading plan is covering information about when you enter, when you exit, how much you risk, and where you cut a loss.

What you need to know first

Start with your life, not the market
Build the plan around your life and circumstances. Decide how much you can lose without harm, how much time you genuinely have each day, and how patient you are, before you pick any strategy.
Risk 1 to 2 percent per trade, never more
On a $1,000 account that is $10 to $20 of risk per position. This one rule is what keeps beginners in the game long enough to improve.
Master one strategy before adding a second
Jumping between methods after a few losses guarantees you never get good at any of them.
Test before you trust
Backtest your rules across past trades, Trade on a 3Commas account before risking real money.
Automation protects the plan from you
The biggest threat to any plan is overriding it under pressure. Bots execute the rules you set when you were calm.
Use the checklist and a ready-made example
Further down you will find a run-through checklist plus five complete example plans you can copy and adapt to your own situation.

Why a written plan?

Almost everyone who starts trading crypto begins the same way: buy when it looks like it is rising, sell when it looks like it is falling, and trust their reading of the chart. That is not a strategy.

The real value of a written plan shows up in the hard moments. When a position is down 8 percent and still sliding, you face one of the most demanding decisions in trading: hold or cut. If you answer that question in advance, when you are calm, you simply act on the rule. If you did not, you decide with fear as your main input, which is exactly when people make their worst calls.

A plan also turns losses into something useful. With rules in place, a losing trade can be reviewed: did you follow the entry criteria, was the stop in the right place, did you exit where you said you would? Each answer sharpens the next trade. Without rules, a loss is just a bad feeling with nothing to learn from.

Nikolai Tovarnitski, 3Commas trading expert: On how beginners and experienced traders think differently

Beginner traders usually focus only on finding entries. They look for signals, indicators, or magic setups that can make fast profits. Advanced traders think differently. They focus more on risk management, patience, and consistency. They understand that trading is not about winning every trade. It is about managing money and surviving long term. A beginner often changes strategies after a few losing trades. An experienced trader follows a tested plan and understands that losses are a normal part of trading. In simple words: beginners search for quick profits, and experienced traders build systems that can work for years.

The four questions at the heart of every plan

A trading plan needs to answer four questions clearly enough that you can judge any potential trade against them and get a clean yes or no.

Nikolai Tovarnitski, 3Commas trading expert: On what actually makes something a strategy rather than a guess

Write down clear rules. A real strategy answers four simple questions: when will I open a position, when will I close a position, how much will I put into the position without risking too much, and if something goes wrong, where will I close the position at a loss so I do not risk my whole deposit? If you cannot write your strategy down in a few sentences, it is not a strategy. It is just guesses and unconsidered decisions.

Everything else in a plan, the goals, the routine, the record-keeping, supports those four answers. Get them right and you have a functioning plan. Leave any of them as it depends or I will decide in the moment, and you have a gap that emotion will fill at the worst possible time.

Step 1: start with yourself, not the chart

The same strategy can be excellent for one person and unworkable for another.

How much can you actually afford to lose?

This is money you can put into trading without a loan, without touching your emergency fund, and without changing how you live if it all disappears. Trading with money you genuinely do not need protects your judgment. Trading with money you cannot afford to lose corrupts every decision you make, usually without you noticing until the damage is done.

How much time do you have?

This answer sets your trading style more than anything else. Day trading needs continuous attention. Swing trading needs one to two hours a day. An automated DCA or Grid setup needs initial configuration and occasional review. A plan built on the time you actually have, rather than the time you wish you had, is the one that survives real life.

How patient are you?

Patience means being able to sit in cash, waiting for a setup that meets all your criteria, while the market moves without you. Impatient traders force entries that do not meet their own rules and still feel disciplined because they have a plan. If you know patience is hard for you, lean more on automation: a bot that only enters on specific conditions is more patient than any human.

Nikolai Tovarnitski, 3Commas trading expert: On fitting the strategy to your life

Start by knowing yourself. Before you even look at a chart, answer three questions: how much money can I actually put into trading without taking a loan and still live a normal life if I lose it? How much time can I spend on trading each day? Am I a patient person, or do I lose interest quickly? Your strategy must fit your life, not the other way around. A busy person with a full-time job might find manual trading too demanding, and using bots can be a better option. 3Commas is a great platform for this; you can build a flexible setup that suits both demanding traders and beginners.

Step 2: pick one strategy and go deep

After trading with no plan at all, the next most common mistake is trying to run several strategies at once. People read about breakouts on Monday, mean reversion on Tuesday, trend following on Wednesday, and end up using a little of each depending on their mood, which means using none of them properly.

A strategy works because it exploits one specific, repeatable pattern in how a market behaves. Learning to recognise and trade that pattern reliably takes months of focused practice. Split your attention across several methods and you never develop the recognition any of them requires.

The main trading styles at a glance

Style	Typical hold	Daily time needed	Best suited for
Day trading	Minutes to hours, no overnight	4 to 8 hours active	People who can dedicate full, distraction-free sessions
Swing trading	Days to weeks	1 to 2 hours plus checks	Part-time traders with steady evening availability
Position trading	Weeks to months	30 min weekly review	Patient people with long horizons and little time
DCA accumulation	Ongoing, no fixed exit	Set up once, review monthly	Anyone wanting exposure without active trading
Automated (bots)	Set by bot parameters	Setup plus 15 to 30 min review	Any trader wanting systematic execution, less screen time

Read more: Day trading with 3commas

Nikolai Tovarnitski, 3Commas trading expert: On mastering one method first

Pick one strategy and grow in it. Do not try to trade in many different ways at once. At the very start of your journey, learn what methods and strategies actually exist out there. You may need some testing to understand which approach suits you best. Choose one of the strategies you like the most and start developing yourself in it. Once you succeed with one and it works well for you, you can begin to expand into another method or strategy. Learn everything step by step. It is much better to become a professional in one thing than to fail in many. Study how your chosen market moves, learn when it is active, and you will grow much faster.

Step 3: set your risk rules

Risk management is the ground the whole plan stands on. Without it, even a genuinely profitable strategy will eventually hit a losing streak big enough to end the account.

The 1 to 2 percent rule

Never risk more than 1 to 2 percent of your total capital on a single trade. On $1,000 that is a $10 to $20 maximum loss per position. The maths is what makes this work: at 1 percent risk, twenty straight losses still leave you with 82 percent of your capital, which is fully recoverable. At 10 percent risk, the same streak leaves you with 12 percent, which usually is not.

Nikolai Tovarnitski, 3Commas trading expert: On the one rule that keeps beginners alive

My golden rule: never risk more than 1 to 2 percent of your account on a single trade. If your account is $1,000, you should not lose more than $10 to $20 on one trade if it goes wrong. This single rule keeps beginners alive in the market. Most new traders who blow up their accounts do so not because their strategy was terrible, but because they risked too much on too few trades. The position sizing discipline is what separates traders who survive long enough to get good from those who do not.

Turning your risk rule into a position size

Position sizing calculation

Account: $5,000. Max risk per trade: 2 percent = $100. You buy ETH at $3,200 with a stop at $3,040, which is 5 percent below entry. Distance to stop: $160. Position size = $100 divided by $160 = 0.625 ETH, worth about $2,000. If the stop triggers you lose exactly $100, which is 2 percent of the account, exactly as planned.

Daily and weekly loss limits

Beyond per-trade risk, add two guardrails. A daily loss limit, often 3 to 5 percent of capital, is the point where you stop trading for the day no matter what. A weekly limit does the same over a longer window. These exist because losing streaks create emotional states that produce more losses, and a hard stop breaks that loop before a bad day becomes a catastrophic one.

Step 4: write your entry and exit criteria

Entry and exit criteria are the specific, observable conditions that say a trade is worth taking and when to close it. The more precisely you define them, the less room emotion has to interpret the moment for you.

Good entry criteria are measurable. For a technical swing approach that might be: price above the 200-day moving average, the four-hour RSI pulled back below 40, and a bullish engulfing candle at a prior support level. All three present at once, or you wait. On 3Commas, Signal Bots can be set to open a position only when those exact conditions trigger, which removes interpretation entirely.

Exits deserve more planning than entries, not less, because the exit is where money is protected or made. Every trade needs both a profit exit and a loss exit defined before it opens.

Step 5: use automation to actually follow the plan

The best-designed plan has one weak point: you. Not through lack of discipline, but because humans are not wired to make consistent, rule-based decisions under financial stress. The fix is to take as many live decisions out of the process as possible.

Nikolai Tovarnitski, 3Commas trading expert: On automating the rules you have written

Test before you trust. Open a historical chart and check: would my rules have made money over the last 100 trades? If a strategy did not work in the past, it probably will not work in the future. If there is no way to run a proper backtest, start testing with very small amounts, or use a Demo account on 3Commas, where you can fully test your strategy in real time without losing any real money. Then keep analyzing your trading. It is like a sculptor working with clay. First, you create the rough shape of what you want, then step by step, you refine it. A well-thought-out and polished strategy can last a long time and provide a stable extra income, or even your main income.

A DCA bot runs regular purchases on your rules without manual input each time. A Grid bot captures price swings inside a defined range around the clock. SmartTrade lets you set entry, stop-loss, and up to three take-profit targets together, with Stop Loss Breakeven and Trailing Stop Loss adjusting your protection automatically as the trade develops. In each case the logic from your written plan is encoded once and executed consistently.

Read more about DCA bots with 3commas

Your trading plan checklist

Run through this before you go live with any plan. Every box should be ticked. If you cannot tick one, that part of the plan is not finished, and the gap is where avoidable losses come from.

Before you choose a strategy

I know my true risk capital. I have a specific figure I can lose entirely without taking a loan or affecting how I live.
I know my daily time budget. I have an honest number for how long I can spend on trading each day, not an aspirational one.
I have matched my style to my time and patience. My chosen approach fits the time I have and how I handle waiting.

Risk rules

I have set my max risk per trade. It is 1 to 2 percent of my account, written as a dollar figure at my current balance.
I have a daily loss limit. I know the loss level at which I stop trading for the day, no exceptions.
I can calculate my position size. I can work out position size from entry price, stop distance, and max risk before any trade.

Entry and exit

My entry conditions are specific and measurable. I can list the exact conditions that must all be true before I open a position.
I have a take-profit rule. I know the price or condition at which I take profit, including any partial exits.
I have a stop-loss rule. I know the exact price at which I exit a losing trade, and I will not move it once set.
My risk-reward ratio is at least 1 to 1.5. My profit target is at least 1.5 times my risk distance on every trade.

Testing

I have backtested across at least 100 setups. My rules were profitable over historical data across different market conditions.
I have paper traded for 2 to 4 weeks. I have run the full strategy on a demo account and seen how it behaves in live conditions.
I know my key metrics. I have a read on win rate, average win versus average loss, and maximum drawdown.

Routine and review

I have a daily pre-trade routine. I check sentiment, the Bitcoin chart, and the economic calendar before acting.
I have a position-check schedule. I know when I look at open positions, and I do not look outside those times.
I keep a trading journal. I log entry, exit, size, reason, and outcome for every trade and review it weekly.
I have a plan review date. I review and refine the whole plan on a fixed schedule, usually quarterly.

Fill-in plan template

Use this template to write your own plan. Keep it to a single page where you can. Each row is a prompt to complete in your own words and numbers.

Section	Complete this
Capital allocation	Total allocated to trading: $___. Money I can afford to lose entirely.
Trading style	Day trading / Swing / Position / DCA automation / Grid automation (choose one).
Goal	Target ___% per month, measured across at least 30 trades.
Max risk per trade	No more than ___% per trade. At my balance, that is $___.
Daily loss limit	If I lose more than ___% today, I stop until the next session.
Assets I trade	I trade ___ only, until the plan is consistently profitable.
Entry conditions	Open when ALL true: (1) ___ (2) ___ (3) ___.
Take-profit rule	Close ___% at ___, trail remaining ___% with a ___% trailing stop.
Stop-loss rule	Close at a loss when price reaches ___. I do not move this once set.
Review schedule	Check positions at ___ and ___. Journal review every ___. Plan to review every ___.

Five complete plan examples

These five examples turn the principles above into concrete plans. The first two suit hands-off and active traders. The next three cover ranging markets, the busy professional, and the complete beginner. Treat them as starting points to adapt, not formulas to copy blindly.

Example 1: conservative DCA accumulation

Style: automated DCA accumulation of BTC and ETH. Capital: $3,000 total, $1,500 per asset. There is no per-trade stop here; the plan assumes long-term holding through volatility with a defined drawdown limit instead.

Rules: a DCA bot buys $50 of BTC every Monday regardless of price, adding safety orders if the price drops 8, 15, and 25 percent from the last buy. The bot closes the position when the average entry plus 15 percent is reached. If BTC falls 40 percent from the original entry, new buys pause, the macro picture gets reviewed, and buying resumes when conditions improve.

Routine: check the Fear and Greed Index weekly, review bot performance monthly, review the whole plan quarterly. Best suited for someone who wants crypto exposure with minimal screen time.

Example 2: active swing trading

Style: swing trading BTC/USDT and ETH/USDT on spot. Sessions: two hours each evening. Risk per trade: 2 percent of the account.

Entry: price above the 200-day EMA, four-hour RSI below 40, and a bullish engulfing candle at a prior support level, all three at once. Take-profit: first target at 1.5 times the risk distance (close 50 percent), second at 3 times (close the rest). Stop-loss: 2 percent below the entry candle low, moved to breakeven once the first target hits.

Routine: 30-minute chart review each evening, one midday position check, journal updated same day, weekly review on Sunday.

Example 3: Grid bot plan for ranging markets

Style: automated Grid bot for sideways, range-bound conditions. This plan is built for periods when an asset is consolidating rather than trending, where a grid can harvest the back-and-forth movement. Capital: $2,000 allocated to a single liquid pair such as BTC/USDT or ETH/USDT.

Setup: before launching, confirm the asset is genuinely ranging, not trending, by checking that price has bounced between a clear upper and lower band several times on the daily chart, and that RSI sits in a neutral zone rather than trending toward an extreme. Set the grid range between the established support and resistance levels, for example a lower bound near recent support and an upper bound near recent resistance. Enable Trailing Up so the grid follows the market if price breaks above the range, and enable a Stop Loss below the lower bound in case support breaks.

Risk rules: the full $2,000 is the most that can be in the grid at once, and the stop-loss below the range caps the downside if the asset breaks out to the downside. No leverage. Take-profit happens continuously as the bot completes buy-low, sell-high cycles inside the range.

Routine: check daily that the asset is still ranging rather than trending; a strong trend is the signal to pause or reconfigure the grid. Review weekly. Best suited for someone comfortable identifying ranging conditions who wants the bot to work the range automatically. This plan applies the expert principle of studying how your chosen market moves and learning when it is active, then letting automation handle execution.

Example 4: Part-time plan for a full-time job

Style: a deliberately low-time-commitment plan for someone with a demanding day job and roughly 30 minutes available in the evening. This directly follows the expert advice that a busy person with a full-time job might find manual trading too demanding, and that bots can be the better option. Capital: $2,500.

Structure: 70 percent of capital ($1,750) runs in a backtested DCA bot accumulating BTC on a weekly schedule, requiring no daily input. The remaining 30 percent ($750) is reserved for at most one or two manual swing trades per week, taken only when a clear, pre-defined setup appears. Risk per manual trade: 2 percent of total account, so a $50 maximum loss.

Entry for the manual portion: the same three-condition swing setup as Example 2, but the trader only acts if the setup is present during their evening review window. If no qualifying setup appears, no manual trade is taken that day, and that is treated as a success, not a missed opportunity. Take-profit and stop-loss follow the Example 2 structure. The DCA bot follows its own configured take-profit.

Routine: 30 minutes each evening to review the bot, check for a qualifying manual setup, and update the journal. Weekly review on the weekend. This plan is built around the reality that forcing trades to fill spare time is how part-time traders lose money; patience and automation do the heavy lifting.

Example 5: beginner first-90-days plan

Style: a learning-focused plan whose primary goal is not profit but survival and skill-building, in line with the expert view that beginners should learn one thing well rather than chase quick wins. Capital: $500, treated entirely as tuition. The explicit objective for the first 90 days is to finish with most of the capital intact and a journal full of lessons, not to grow the account.

Structure: spot trading only, no leverage, no futures. Two pairs maximum (BTC/USDT and ETH/USDT). Risk per trade: 1 percent, so a $5 maximum loss, kept small on purpose so that mistakes are cheap. The first two to four weeks are spent entirely on a 3Commas demo account, placing no real-money trades at all, to learn order types and how the chosen pairs move.

Entry: one simple, written rule, for example buy when the four-hour RSI drops below 30 (oversold) and the price is at or near a prior support level. Take-profit: a single fixed target at 1.5 times the risk distance. Stop-loss: below the nearest support level. Every trade is logged with the reason and outcome.

Routine: daily demo or small live trading during the learning window, a journal entry for every trade, and a weekly review asking one question: am I following my own rules? At day 90, the trader reviews the journal, keeps what worked, and only then considers increasing position size. This plan turns the expert sculptor idea into a starting point: a rough first shape that gets refined with real data before any real capital is at stake.

Common mistakes when building your first plan

Mistake	What it looks like	How to avoid it
Plan too complex	Fifteen indicators and six conditions that are impossible to apply consistently.	A good plan fits on one page. If it needs a decision tree, simplify it.
Unrealistic targets	Expecting 10 percent a week on a small account, which drives overtrading.	Base targets on what your backtest actually produced, not on what you want to earn.
No stop-loss in the plan	Entry and target defined, but losses handled with I will exit if it falls too far.	Every plan defines a maximum loss and the exact exit price. No exception.
Skipping testing	Taking a strategy from a video and going live the same day.	100 backtested setups plus 2 to 4 weeks of paper trading before real money.
Never updating it	Running an 18-month-old plan unchanged as conditions shift.	Review the plan quarterly, keep what works, adjust what does not.
Bailing after losses	Abandoning the plan after three losing trades before it has enough data.	Decide in advance what drawdown triggers a review versus a full change.

Frequently asked questions

Answer four questions in writing: when you open a position, when you close it at a profit, when you close it at a loss, and how much you risk per trade. Add your capital, your chosen style, your routine, and what you will record for each trade. Keep it to one page. A plan you will actually follow beats a perfect plan you cannot stick to.
A swing example: trade BTC/USDT with 2 percent account risk per trade, enter long when price is above the 200-day EMA and four-hour RSI is below 40 at a support level, stop 2 percent below the entry candle low, take 50 percent profit at 1.5 times risk and the rest at 3 times risk, move the stop to breakeven after the first target, review the journal weekly. The five worked examples above cover DCA, swing, grid, part-time, and beginner versions in full.
A position-sizing guide that caps concentration: no more than 3 percent of capital in any single trade, no more than 5 percent in any one market or asset, and no more than 7 percent at risk across all open positions at once. In crypto, where many assets move with Bitcoin, the 5 percent rule matters because seemingly separate positions are often correlated.
It depends on account size and strategy performance. A 1 percent daily return on $100,000 is $1,000, which is achievable for disciplined systematic traders but takes years of practice and real capital. Beginners should focus on building a profitable strategy at small scale first. Someone who cannot make $50 consistently on a $5,000 account is not ready to target $1,000 a day.
Expect four to eight weeks for the first version: one to two weeks on rules and self-assessment, two to three weeks of backtesting, and two to four weeks of paper trading. Then plan for three to six months of small live trading before you have enough real data to judge it properly. A plan is never finished; it improves continuously as you feed it real results.

Risk disclaimer

Crypto trading involves significant risk of loss. Prices are highly volatile and past performance does not guarantee future results. This article is for educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. The plan examples are illustrative and should be adapted to your own circumstances and risk tolerance. Only trade with capital you can afford to lose. 3Commas is a software platform and does not provide investment advice or execute trades without user-defined configuration.

ㅤ

Discord

X(Twitter)

YouTube