- What it is
- A short written document saying what you keep, what you destroy, and what happens to any balance and any open order.
- How you get one
- You sit down once and write it, in whatever plain form you write everything else, then date it and put it away.
- Where to keep it
- With the rest of your offline material, where somebody making a hurried decision would actually look.
- How it goes wrong
- It is written once and never revisited, so it refers to a wallet, an account or an order that no longer exists.
- What fails without it
- Stopping happens as a series of hasty decisions, and hasty decisions here tend towards keeping too much or deleting too much.
- Time to acquire
- An evening to write, and a short reread once or twice a year to keep it honest.
Stopping is a thing that happens to you
The picture people have is of a decision, made calmly, at a time of their choosing. The reality is usually a change in circumstances, or a market that is no longer there, or a growing sense that this is finished, and the actual stopping gets done in an afternoon while distracted.
A plan written earlier converts that afternoon into a list to follow. It does not make the decisions better in some abstract sense. It makes them decisions you took once, on a good day, rather than decisions you improvise while unsettled.
The four questions the plan answers
- What you keep, and for how long. Records with an open question attached stay. Everything else has an end date written next to it.
- What is destroyed, and by what means. Naming the items removes the negotiation you would otherwise have with yourself at the time.
- What happens to a balance. Where it moves, and to which of your own withdrawal targets.
- What happens to open orders. Whether you wait them out first, and what the plan is if one of them never resolves.
The balance question is where plans get vague
Written plans tend to say something like move the balance somewhere sensible, which is not a plan. The destination has to be named, because naming it is the hard part and it is exactly the part you will not want to be working out on the day. The place it goes should be somewhere you already control, set up earlier, and covered by the wallet page.
The other half is the ordering. Withdrawing before open orders have resolved is a different decision from waiting, and both are defensible. What is not defensible is discovering halfway through that you have to choose, having not thought about it.
What deletion actually means here
Deleting the wrong things is as common as keeping the wrong things. People destroy their order records while an order is still open, and lose the only account they had of it. Others keep everything for years out of vague caution, which is its own kind of exposure.
The plan settles this in advance, item by item, with a condition attached rather than a date where a date would be a guess. An order record goes when the order is closed and any window on it has passed. A key backup goes when the identity attached to it is genuinely finished with, which is a decision covered by retiring an item.
Why it needs rewriting
This item ages faster than anything else in the stage, and it ages invisibly. Wallets get replaced. Accounts get abandoned. Orders close. A plan written eighteen months ago describes an arrangement you may no longer have, and following it produces confusion at the worst time.
The upkeep is a reread rather than a rewrite. Run down the named items and confirm each one still exists. Where something has gone, either strike the line or replace it. Date the reread, following dates, so the next reader of the plan, who is you, knows how far to trust it.
Keeping it short enough to follow
A page is plenty. Long plans do not get read at the moment they matter, and a plan that is not read is a diary entry. Write it in the same plain form as everything else in where things live, keep it with the material it refers to, and resist the urge to explain your reasoning inside it. The reasoning was the work. The document is the result.
Questions that come up
Is this not overthinking it?
For somebody with no balance anywhere and no open orders, the plan is two lines and takes almost no time, which is a fair reflection of how little there is to decide. It stops being overthinking the moment there is a balance sitting somewhere or an order outstanding, because both of those turn stopping into a sequence with an order that matters.
What if I want to stop right now and have no plan?
Then write one this evening rather than acting immediately, unless something makes waiting unwise. An hour spent listing what exists and what happens to each item is the difference between stopping cleanly and finding out in six months that a record you needed went and a file you did not want kept is still sitting there.
Should the plan cover what happens if I cannot act on it?
That is a decision well outside the scope of this site and involves other people, so no guidance is offered. What can be said is that plans of that kind are a separate document with separate considerations, and mixing them into a simple stopping plan tends to produce something too complicated for either purpose.