Trading plan for binary options: rules, an example and a template

A good trading plan matters most not when you are calm, but after the thought “this time I can make an exception.” It answers in advance what situation you are waiting for, how much you are willing to stake, why you would skip an entry and when you will end the day. Below we walk through a plan for binary and digital options on intrade.bar. The article comes with a fillable HTML form and a Word file: a full template, a worked example and a short pre-trade checklist.

Start with a task you can actually complete

“Make five percent today” is a wish, not a description of work. The market may not offer suitable conditions, but the money target stays. Then comes the temptation to make up the shortfall with random trades. The number in the plan starts driving your behavior more than the original strategy does.

A workable task is more specific: test one version of a signal on a demo account, watch the chosen pair at the set time and record every qualifying case. Such a session may have no trades at all. If the conditions didn’t appear, you have followed the plan. The terminal doesn’t keep an attendance sheet or demand a minimum number of clicks.

Keep the quality of the idea separate from the discipline of executing it. A clearly described rule doesn’t yet have a proven edge. So after a session you ask two questions: did you follow the conditions, and what did the hypothesis itself show? A loss while following the rules is part of the test results, and a profit after breaking them doesn’t turn the exception into a good rule.

Specify the account, asset, time and rules version

In the first part of the plan, write down the account mode, the currency, the starting balance and the date. On intrade.bar, demo and real data are kept separate: make sure you are testing your practice hypothesis in the mode you chose. Mixing two accounts makes the comparison awkward before the first trade even happens.

Next, state the exact asset symbol, the quote source, the timeframe and the contract mode. On intrade.bar, FXCM is used for currency quotes and Binance for BTC/USDT. This matters if you did your analysis or historical testing in another service. A similar instrument name doesn’t guarantee matching prices and candles.

Write the time with the time zone: for example, 14:00–15:00 UTC, not “an hour after lunch.” Add the last acceptable entry time. If all ten-minute trades must be finished by the end of the session, new trades after 14:50 no longer qualify. intrade.bar has no early closing, so any conflict with the schedule has to be resolved before the trade.

Give the rules a short name and a version number. Repeating the same version on another day is just a new session. Changing the expiry, signal or filter is a change of hypothesis. The number helps you later understand which decisions produced the observed result, instead of trying to remember “how I usually traded back then.”

Describe the entry so it is recognizable before the result

Phrases like “a good level” and “a convincing reversal” need to be spelled out. Which completed candles do you use to mark the zone? What counts as confirmation? At what moment do you get the right to consider a trade? The answer doesn’t have to look like program code, but it should let you tell a qualifying situation from a similar-looking one.

A practice version: the range boundaries are marked before the session starts; on the five-minute chart a candle closes above the upper boundary; the decision is considered after the close. The acceptable zone for the actual entry and the expiry are then defined separately. This example on its own doesn’t prove that breakouts are profitable to trade: it shows how to make a hypothesis testable.

For a digital option, direction and expiry are different parameters. Overall the price may be rising, yet at the chosen moment it may be below your entry. The note “buy with the trend” doesn’t solve this. The plan needs a specific way of choosing the duration, not a promise to figure it out while the price is moving.

Give yourself permission to skip a trade in advance

Conditions for skipping are often more useful than yet another indicator. Write down what to do with an unfinished candle, an unsuitable percentage, a late entry, an unclear price or an unavailable expiry. In each of these situations it should be clear why there is no new trade. Otherwise any exception is easy to explain away as a “special case.”

Decide separately how you treat news. If the hypothesis wasn’t tested during major releases, don’t treat those periods as studied by default. You can exclude a window chosen in advance and note it in the plan. The length of the window is chosen to fit your research; there is no universal number of minutes that makes an event safe.

The rule on being late is especially important. You might have seen a qualifying candle, got distracted and come back after a noticeable move. The price, the time left to the event and the relation to the level are now different. Call the situation missed and wait for a new one. Trying to catch up with the old signal doesn’t count as following the plan just because the direction is still the same.

Tie your personal limits to money

A plan needs separate limits on the trade amount, the total open risk and the whole day. A small first amount won’t save you from a long chain of losses. Several simultaneous trades can also create a bigger load than you imagine when looking at each one separately.

Take a practice balance of 10,000, a personal daily limit of 200 and a trade amount of 25. Eight full losses with no profit in between will exhaust that budget. This illustrates how the numbers relate, not recommended or safe percentages. If some trades are still open, their potential losses must be reserved before the next entry.

In the attached template, the personal check works like this: the negative part of the net result of closed trades since the start of the accounting day, plus the amounts of open trades, plus the new amount. With a net loss of 50, open risk of 25 and a new amount of 25, the load is 100. A positive closed result doesn’t expand the set budget. Deposits and withdrawals are not part of the trading result.

This is a rule you chose for your file, not a description of an internal intrade.bar formula. It is also not the same as the sum of all losses or the drawdown from the day’s peak. Write the definition once and keep it until the end of the day. An unclear trade status doesn’t free up the reserve: first find out its result, then recalculate the available load.

A setting in the terminal and a line in your file are two separate actions

On intrade.bar, risk management is voluntary. You can choose No limits or set your own daily loss and profit limits. A value of 0 in the relevant field means that particular limit is off. A filled-in line in Word or HTML doesn’t turn the feature on in the platform: the actual setting has to be made separately.

When you set them, the percentages are calculated from the current balance, and the resulting money limits stay fixed until the end of the day. A new trade won’t open if its amount, together with the daily loss already incurred and the amounts of open trades, exceeds the loss limit. Once the set loss or profit limit is reached on closed trades, new trades can’t be opened.

The limits you set can only be changed the next day, Moscow time: a new day starts at 21:00 UTC. Deposits and withdrawals are not counted in the trading result for limits. Keep both your personal rules and your chosen terminal settings in the plan. Together, their purpose is to carry out a decision to stop that was made in advance, before the last trade started arguing with your common sense.

What is in the fillable template

The file helps you go through the whole session: from the starting conditions to the review. In the HTML version you can open the worked example, fill in your own fields, check the amounts entered, save a JSON copy or print the document. The Word version is fine for ordinary editing. The form works separately from your account, doesn’t place orders and doesn’t estimate a strategy’s chances of success.

Don’t just copy the numbers from the example. First enter your real mode, currency and the hypothesis being tested, then define your own limits. All money fields must be in the same currency. To move between devices, save a JSON copy: a local browser draft is no substitute for a backup.

Before each trade, use the short checklist: the right account and asset, a completed signal condition, a suitable expiry and percentage, an acceptable amount, and no reason to stop. If the form shows a limit breach, changing a number to get a green tick doesn’t fix the plan. Correct data entered by mistake, not an inconvenient check result.

What one session on intrade.bar looks like

Imagine a demo session for the breakout described above: one available currency pair, a five-minute chart, a ten-minute Sprint and a fixed practice amount. Before you start, you mark the zone and fill in the plan. In the first situation the price moves above it, but the candle hasn’t closed: you keep watching, no trade.

In the second situation the candle has closed, but the percentage shown is below the minimum the hypothesis was tested for. Record a skip due to the payout. In the third, the signal qualifies, the required duration is available, the actual entry fits the rule and the money check passes. Only now do you have grounds to open a practice trade and save its parameters.

After settlement, don’t rewrite the reason for the entry. If the trade lost but all the conditions were met, that is a result of the hypothesis. If it won but was opened before confirmation, it is a violation with a positive financial outcome. A record like this is more useful than the verdict “I traded well today,” which often just means “the balance got lucky today.”

For your results, use intrade.bar history and statistics, and keep the reasons for decisions separately. The plan answers “what I intended to do,” the journal answers “what I did and how it turned out.” A CSV export helps reconcile times, amounts and results; emotions, the signal version and the reasons for skips need to go into your own notes.

Stopping, technical errors and a new version

Write down money, time and process grounds for stopping in advance. For example, the working window is over, a personal limit has been reached, or you changed the amount outside the plan. The action should be clear: new trades stop, previous ones are checked, and returning is allowed only under a rule chosen in advance. “I’ll just pull myself together” is much harder to verify.

If there is technical uncertainty, first find out the status of the trade you already submitted. Clicking again without checking may create a new trade instead of restoring the old one. For such a case, a pause in the plan is useful: don’t release the reserve, don’t duplicate the action, check the history. No trading idea requires you to make a decision while the state of your account is unknown.

Change the core rules after a session or a set testing period, keeping the old version and the reason. Start with one limitation you discovered, not ten new promises. For your first practice, open the template, fill it in for one intrade.bar demo session and see whether you can explain every decision before the result is known. That is where a trading plan proves its worth.

Questions and answers

Practice materials

• Open the fillable trading plan (in Russian)
• Download the trading plan with a worked example (in Russian)

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