TradingPlan Press Kit.

Founder's Letter

Founder Story — Stuart Jones

I've never blown up an account.

That's not a boast — it's actually part of the problem.

I was trained well. Two mentors who gave me something most traders never get — a structured learning environment, realistic expectations, and one simple truth: follow the process, learn the right way, and the only way you fail is if you quit. So I never quit.

I knew my strategy rules. I had a trading plan — written out properly in Excel, covering everything. Watchlist, market status, strategy rules, risk parameters. I followed my process to the letter. Every time. Most traders dream of having that kind of discipline.

And yet something was still missing.

The plan was complete, correct, and sitting in a spreadsheet. I followed it — but it was disconnected from the flow of an actual trading session. It wasn't alive. It was a document I maintained, not a system I inhabited.

Here's the thing nobody talks about. When you follow a systematic process exactly as designed — it's boring. Deliberately, mechanically boring. That's the point. And boredom, for a trader, is dangerous in a way that's harder to see than a blown account.

I didn't revenge trade. I didn't overtrade. I followed every rule, every time. But following rules robotically, without real engagement, created its own problem. I'd find myself going down rabbit holes between sessions. YouTube videos of gurus with systems that looked exciting. New strategies that promised more action. Forums full of people trying the next thing. I knew — because I'd been trained to know — that the process was take, tweak, test, repeat. So I'd explore, adapt, test. It would never quite work. Either too slow, or didn't fit my personality, or didn't fit my trading lifestyle. Time lost. Momentum lost. Focus diluted.

I wasn't losing money. I was losing something harder to measure — the compounding benefit of staying fully committed to a single process and letting it breathe.

I knew the strategy was almost irrelevant. I'd known it for a while. But it's hard to admit when you've spent years searching for the winning system. The real shift came when I stopped asking "which strategy should I follow?" and started asking "why isn't the one I have feeling like mine?"

The answer was the system around the strategy. Not the rules themselves — the structure that was supposed to hold them together. The Excel sheet that was supposed to be my trading plan was actually just a document. Complete. Correct. Inert.

I needed something that made my plan feel alive. Something that met me where I was each morning — not a document I had to go looking for, but a tool that knew what session I was in, what markets I was watching, what rules applied right now. Something that turned my strategy into a flow I stepped through — not remembered.

I'm a product manager by trade. I'm intolerant of tools that don't just work. I'm a harsh critic of anything that doesn't save time, money, or both. And I love tech that gets out of the way and lets you do the thing.

So I built it.

TradingPlan is the app I needed. A native Apple app — iPhone, iPad, Mac — that helps traders of all levels build a complete trading plan and then actually use it every session. Your strategy rules become a live flow you step through before every trade. Your pre-market routine becomes a checklist you run every morning. Your risk framework sits one tap away, not buried in a spreadsheet tab.

It's not a journal. It's not a signal service. It doesn't connect to your broker or tell you what to trade. It just makes sure that when you sit down to trade, your plan is in front of you — and you follow it.

The gap between knowing your rules and following them costs traders more than any bad strategy ever could. TradingPlan closes that gap.

Stop trading from memory. Start trading from a plan.