The Trade Plan: Entry, Stop, Targets and Risk

When the verdict reaches TRADE, MSP locks a complete plan and draws it on the chart. Understanding where each number comes from is what turns it from a set of lines into something you can trust.

What gets drawn

Four lines and a shaded zone. The zone makes it obvious at a glance whether price is inside your plan or has run away from it.

Where the entry comes from

The entry is anchored to structure, not to wherever price happens to be. In practice that means a Camarilla pivot, a previous day or week high or low, or the level MSP identified as the one being tested.

If price has already travelled too far from that level by the time the signal fires, MSP marks the setup as missed rather than dragging the entry along behind price. There is a setting for how far is too far, expressed in ATR multiples.

How the stop is sized

The stop is based on ATR, the average true range, which is simply the average size of a candle on this instrument and timeframe recently.

This matters because a fixed 20 pip stop is enormous on a quiet EURUSD morning and trivially small on gold during a US session. Sizing the stop from ATR means it adapts to what the instrument is actually doing today.

The two targets

Targets are set as multiples of your risk, which is the distance from entry to stop. That distance is one R.

• Target 1 defaults to 1.5R. If you risk 20 pips, this sits 30 pips away.
• Target 2 defaults to 3.0R, so 60 pips on the same example.

A common approach is to take half the position at Target 1 and move the stop to break even, letting the rest run to Target 2. MSP does not force this, and you can set both multiples to whatever you use.

Sizing the position

This is the part that decides whether you survive long enough to find out if the strategy works.

1. Decide what percentage of your account you are willing to lose on one trade. One percent is a common answer, and one percent is not too small.
2. Read the stop distance from the plan.
3. Work out the lot size that makes that stop distance equal to your chosen percentage.
4. Place the trade at that size. Not the size that feels right, the size the arithmetic gives you.

MSP has a risk percentage setting so it can show you the money value, but the calculator below will do it for any instrument in a few seconds.

Why a plan sometimes will not appear

If the verdict is TRADE but no lines are drawn, one of these is usually the reason.

• The reward to risk of the setup fell below your minimum, so MSP declined to build a plan for it.
• The stop it would need is wider than your hard ceiling setting.
• Trade zones are set to show only when a trade is active, and the trade is not active yet.
• Price has already moved further from the level than your maximum entry distance allows, so the setup counts as missed.