How to review your trades

Each trade has two verdicts. The outcome is the P&L - decided partly by you, partly by the market. The execution grade asks only: did you follow the plan you wrote in your thesis? Entered at the setup, sized as planned, exited at the invalidation or target, no mid-trade improvisation?

Scoring these separately produces a four-way grid, and the two off-diagonal cells are where the learning is. A well-executed loss needs no fixing - it is the cost of doing business. A badly-executed win is the dangerous one: it pays you to repeat a mistake. A process score - where a losing trade executed to plan can still score full marks - keeps the review honest about which is which.

When a position closes, while it is still fresh, answer briefly:

• Did the setup play out as the thesis expected? Which clause was right or wrong?
• Did you follow the plan - entry, size, invalidation, target? Where did you deviate, and why?
• What mistakes did you make? Be specific: “moved my stop after entry” compounds into a fix; “traded badly” compounds into nothing.
• What is the one rule you would write for next time?
• What was your emotional state - and did it drive any decision?

Five minutes per trade is enough. The discipline is doing it for every trade, especially the winners - winners are where unexamined mistakes hide.

On a fixed schedule - weekly for active traders, monthly at minimum - read the recent entries as a batch and look for what no single trade can show:

• Group trades by setup or tag: which setups actually earn, and which only feel like they do?
• Compare stated confidence with results: does your conviction carry information?
• Recount repeated mistakes: is the frequency of “moved my stop” falling or not?
• Check the numbers - win rate, average win against average loss, expectancy - against what you believed they were.

End each periodic review with at most one or two process changes. A review that produces ten resolutions produces zero.

• Reviewing only losers. Half the record, and the half with less to teach - losses are often just variance, while rule-breaking winners are pure reinforcement of bad habits.
• Incomplete records. A review over the trades you bothered to log is a review of your best behaviour. Importing fills automatically removes the temptation to curate.
• Judging with hindsight. The question is never “was the trade right, knowing what happened?” but “was the decision right, knowing what you knew?”