The weekly review: turning a pile of trades into one decision
A 30-minute routine for reading your own week back — what to look at, in what order, and the single change to make before Monday.
Coaches call it reviewing the film. The point is not to relive the week — it is to leave the session with exactly one thing you will do differently. A review that produces five changes produces none, because nothing gets tested.
Thirty minutes, once a week, in a fixed slot. Here is an order that works.
Start with process, not P&L
Open the week's trades and read them before you look at the total. Opening with the number frames everything after it: a green week makes rule-breaks look like judgement calls, and a red week makes good trades look like mistakes. The outcome is the least informative column on the page over a sample this small.
- Count the trades you took that were not in your playbook at all. This number should be near zero, and when it is not, it is the week's finding.
- Read the entry thesis on every loss. Separate the ones where the thesis was wrong from the ones where the execution was.
- Read the entry thesis on every win. Some of them will be worse trades than the losses, and those are the dangerous ones.
- Only now, look at the P&L, the win rate, and the average R.
The two questions worth asking
Everything above feeds two questions. First: did I follow my own rules? Second: are the rules any good? They are separate, and answering them in the wrong order is how traders end up rewriting a strategy that was never actually tested — because it was never actually followed.
End with one change
Write it down as a rule you could break — specific enough that next week's review can tell you plainly whether you followed it. "Be more patient" is not testable. "No entries in the first fifteen minutes" is.
It is not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential.Bruce Lee
Most weeks the right change is a subtraction: one setup you keep taking that does not earn its place. The record is what tells you which one. If you want the grouping and the versioned playbook handled for you, see what the product does or start a free trial.