How To Run A Weekly Trading Review In 30 Minutes

Friday's close comes and you know roughly how the week went. Up a little, down a little. Ask yourself why and you get a story instead of an answer, built around the best win and the worst loss, while the ten ordinary trades that actually decided the week fade out.

A weekly review fixes that. Thirty minutes, the same time every week, the same five steps. Here's how to run one, with a hypothetical week worked all the way through.

Set It Up Once

Pick a fixed slot outside market hours, such as Saturday morning or Sunday evening, when no open chart is pulling at you. Put it in your calendar like any other appointment.

Make one rule with it: the plan only changes during the review. The written trading plan lesson puts it simply: change the plan on weekends, never mid-session. Ideas that hit you on Tuesday afternoon go on a list for the review.

Before you start, make sure every trade from the week is logged with its entry, stop, exit, fees, setup, whether you followed your plan and one line about your state of mind. If a trade is missing, log it first. A review of half a log is fiction.

Step 1: Count The Week In R

Spend the first five minutes turning every result into R, the planned loss on each trade. Our guide to R-multiples shows how. Dollar totals mix up how big you traded with how well you traded. R strips out the size.

Here's the hypothetical week. The account is $20,000 and risks 1% per trade, so R is $200. Twelve trades closed:

• Eight followed the plan: four winners of +2R, +1.5R, +2.5R and +2R, and four losers of -1R each.
• Four broke the plan: one winner of +0.5R, and losers of -1R, -1.8R and -2.2R.

Net for the week: -0.5R, or -$100. On the surface, a flat, forgettable week.

Step 2: Split Plan Trades From Off-Plan Trades

Now spend ten minutes on the most useful split in trading: the trades you planned versus the trades you didn't.

• Plan trades: +8R from the winners, -4R from the losers, for a total of +4R. That's +0.5R per trade.
• Off-plan trades: +0.5R from the winner, -5R from the losers, for a total of -4.5R. That's -1.125R per trade.

The plan made 4R. Four trades outside it gave all of that back, plus another half R. The week wasn't flat. It was a decent week with a leak.

Eight trades are far too few to prove the plan has an edge, so don't read the +0.5R as a verdict on your strategy. What one week can show is behavior. A broken rule is a broken rule, whether it happens once or fifty times.

Step 3: Check Every Loss Bigger Than 1R

If your sizing is right, a normal loss is about -1R. Anything bigger has a cause, and the cause belongs in writing. In the example there are two:

• The -2.2R loss: the stop was moved lower after entry "to give it room."
• The -1.8R loss: the trade was entered without a stop, and the stop went in late.

Sort each one into a bucket. Execution mistakes, like a moved stop or a missing stop, are fixed with rules. Market events, like a gap through your stop on news, are fixed with position size and by deciding in advance whether you hold through scheduled events. Either way, the number tells you where to look and the note tells you what happened.

Also check the week's total against your weekly loss limit. If you hit it and kept trading, that goes on the list too.

Step 4: Look At Setups, Then Leave Them Alone

Group the plan trades by setup and write down the count and total R for each. Keep a running tally across weeks.

Then resist the urge to act on it. A setup that lost three times this week tells you almost nothing. Wait until a setup has a meaningful sample, say 20 trades or more, before you decide to keep it, tweak it or retire it. Cutting setups on a week's results means trading your mood, just more slowly.

What you can act on every week is your process: the stops, the sizes, the trades you weren't supposed to take.

Step 5: Write One Change For Next Week

Finish with five minutes and three lines:

• Keep: the one thing that worked and that you want to repeat. In the example, "waited for the retest on every plan trade."
• Stop: the one habit that cost the most. In the example, "trading names that weren't on the morning watchlist."
• New rule: one concrete rule that blocks next week's version of the same leak. In the example, "every entry goes in as a bracket order with the stop attached."

One rule, not five. Write it at the top of your plan where you'll see it before every session. Next week's review opens with one question: did I follow it?

The psychology and journaling lesson explains why the review works. Memory favors the big wins and the most painful losses. Your journal remembers all of it.

Join The Pod and make the weekly review a 30-minute habit instead of a weekend spreadsheet project. The private trade journal works out your R, win rate, expectancy and profit factor for you, filters your trades into followed plan and broke plan in one click, and exports to CSV when you want to group by setup. Lesson 10 walks you through an honest review, and Lesson 7 shows you where each new rule goes in your plan. Join The Pod monthly and run your first review this weekend.