How to Review Your Trading Week

Most traders end the week and just look at one number. How much did I make or lose.

That's not a review. That's just checking your balance.

A real week review takes maybe 20 minutes and it will improve your trading faster than any strategy video you'll ever watch.

Here's what you're actually looking at.

Did You Follow Your Rules?

Not did you win — did you follow your rules. Because you can follow your rules and lose, and that's fine. You can break your rules and win, and that's actually a problem — because it teaches you the wrong thing.

This is the part most traders get backwards. A win reinforces whatever you did, whether or not it was actually correct. Break your stop-loss rule and get away with it once, and your brain quietly files that away as "worked out fine," even though it was a bad decision that happened to have a good outcome. Left unchecked, that's exactly how a trader ends up rule-following on paper but rule-breaking in practice — because the wins from breaking the rules never got flagged as mistakes in the first place.

Which Trades Were Clean and Which Were You Reaching?

Go back through every entry. Would you take that trade again? If the answer is no, why did you take it the first time?

This question separates two very different categories of trade that can look identical in your P&L. A clean setup that lost is not the same thing as a reach that happened to win, even though both might show up as a green or red number with nothing to distinguish them. You only find the difference by actually going back and looking at the setup itself, not just the result it produced.

Was There a Pattern in Your Losses?

Same time of day? Same type of setup? Same emotional state going in?

Patterns in losses are information. They're telling you something fixable. A cluster of losses that all happened in the last hour of your session, or all came right after a previous loss, or all came from the same kind of marginal setup, isn't bad luck repeating itself. It's a specific, nameable habit, and specific habits can actually be fixed — which is a lot more useful than the vague sense that "this was a rough week."

And What Went Right

Seriously — what did you do well this week? Because if you only audit the bad, you'll start to think everything you do is wrong. It's not.

This step gets skipped more than any other, and it's a real cost, not just a nice-to-have. A review that's only ever a list of mistakes trains you to associate your own trading with criticism, which makes you dread the review and eventually skip it altogether. Naming what actually went well — the trade you correctly passed on, the rule you held to under pressure — is what makes the process sustainable enough to actually keep doing week after week.

Write It Down

Even three sentences. The act of writing it makes it stick.

It doesn't need to be a polished document. What did I do well, what pattern showed up in my losses, what am I adjusting next week — three honest sentences answering those covers most of the value. The writing itself is what turns a vague impression of the week into something concrete enough to actually act on.

Your journal is your second strategy. Don't skip it.