How to actually review your trades: a repeatable weekly workflow

Most traders believe they review their trades. What they actually do is open the platform on Sunday, scroll the equity curve, feel good or bad for ninety seconds, and close the tab. That is not a review. That is emotional weather.

A real review is a process with an output: a short list of concrete changes you will make next week. If your review does not end in a decision, it was journaling as therapy, not as work. The good news is that a proper review does not take hours. Once your trades are logged and tagged, the whole loop is about twenty minutes.

Outcome review vs. process review

The single most important distinction is between reviewing the outcome and reviewing the process.

Outcome review asks "did I make money?" Process review asks "did I do the right thing, given what I could see at the time?" These are not the same question, and confusing them is how good traders slowly train themselves into bad habits.

A well-executed trade can lose. A reckless, rule-breaking trade can win. If you only reward the winners, you are teaching yourself to chase results you do not control. So grade the decision first, and let the result be a separate column.

For every trade, answer two independent questions:

• Did I follow my plan on entry, size, and exit?
• What was the result, in R?

That gives you four buckets. The quietly dangerous one is broke the plan and won — those trades feel fantastic and are exactly the ones that blow up an account three weeks later.

What to actually look at

Open your stats and walk through them in the same order every week. Retrace auto-charts every trade on the real candles and surfaces these numbers for you, so you are reading, not rebuilding spreadsheets:

• Equity curve — not for the feeling, but for shape. Is it a steady climb, or a sawtooth of one big loss undoing ten small wins?
• Edge score and expectancy — is your average trade still positive in R?
• P&L by session and by weekday — almost everyone has a best session and a worst weekday. Most people have never checked.
• Your biggest winners AND your biggest losers — study both. The losers show you where risk leaked; the winners show you what your real edge looks like when it works.
• Rule adherence — what percentage of trades followed the plan? This is the number that predicts next month.

The weekly loop

Block twenty minutes, once a week, and go through it in order:

1. Tag each trade with the strategy you intended to trade. Not the one that would have worked, the one you meant to take.
2. Mark whether entry, risk, and exit followed the rules.
3. Write one sentence per trade: what would I do differently with the same chart in front of me?
4. Group by strategy and by mistake. Look for the single repeated error that costs the most, not a list of twenty tiny things.
5. Check the four questions on the checklist below.

The checklist

• Did I break a rule this week, and did breaking it win or lose?
• Which strategy tag is actually carrying my P&L, and which one is bleeding?
• Did any single loss exceed my planned risk? Why?
• What is my best session, and what percentage of my trades happened outside it?
• Was there a trade I took out of boredom, tilt, or revenge?

Tagging is what turns review into edge

A pile of trades tells you nothing. The same trades tagged by strategy tell you everything. When you tag consistently, per-strategy stats appear on their own: this setup runs a 1.8 profit factor, that one has lost money for two months straight. You cannot improve a blur. You can absolutely cut a losing tag.

Mood tags do the same job for the psychological side. Tag the trades you took while frustrated or bored, and after a month the pattern is undeniable. Most people find their worst expectancy lives in a specific emotional state, not a specific setup.

End with one rule change

Finish every review by writing down a single rule change for the coming week. One. Not a manifesto.

Maybe it is "no entries in the first five minutes of the session," or "cut size in half after two losses in a day," or "no trades on Wednesday afternoons until the data says otherwise." Narrow, testable, and reviewable next week — that is the entire point.

A journal that produces one better rule every week compounds faster than any indicator you will ever buy. If you want the twenty-minute version of this, Retrace already charts and scores each trade for you, so the review is reading and deciding, not data entry. Log a week, tag it, and see what your process is actually telling you.