How to review a trade

By Etaaro · Last updated 18 September 2026 · Educational content, not investment advice

Reviewing a trade well means separating the decision from the result. This is a structured way to do that — for a single trade, and for a month of them — without turning every loss into a new rule.

The one principle

A trade has an outcome and a process, and they are only loosely connected in the short run. Good decisions lose money regularly. Bad decisions are rewarded often enough to be dangerous. If your review grades the outcome, you will slowly train yourself toward whatever recently worked.

So every question below is about what you knew and did at the time, not about how it ended.

Reviewing a single trade

The entry

• What specifically made me enter? Can I state it as a condition rather than a feeling?
• Was that condition actually present, or did I decide it was close enough?
• Did I wait for confirmation I had said I would wait for?
• Would I have taken this trade if the previous one had gone the other way?

That last one catches most revenge and hesitation trades, which rarely announce themselves at the time.

The size

• Was the risk the amount I had decided, or was it adjusted because I felt strongly?
• If I sized up, what was the reason — and was that reason written down before?

Unplanned size changes are worth flagging even when they work, because a doubled position that wins teaches exactly the wrong lesson.

The management

• Did I move the exit after entering? In which direction, and why?
• Did I add to a losing position?
• Did I watch it more than the trade warranted?

The exit

• Did I exit for the reason I had planned, or because I was uncomfortable?
• If I took profit early, what did I think would happen next, and was I right?
• If I was stopped out, was the stop in a sensible place, or somewhere convenient?

The verdict

Grade it in one of four boxes, which is more useful than a score:

	Followed the plan	Did not follow the plan
Made money	Good trade. Repeat.	Warning. You were paid for a mistake.
Lost money	Fine. This is the cost of doing business.	The one to actually work on.

The top-right box is the one people skip. A profitable trade taken against your own rules is a worse signal than a disciplined loss, because it is the one your instincts will want to repeat.

Reviewing a month

Single-trade reviews catch mistakes. Monthly reviews catch patterns, which is where the value is.

1. Review on a schedule, not after a painful day. Reviewing while annoyed produces rules designed to prevent the last loss rather than the common one.
2. Read the process failures first, regardless of profit. Sort by "did not follow the plan" and read those entries as a group.
3. Count, do not remember. How many times did "moved my stop" appear? Impressions are unreliable; the tally is not.
4. Look for clustering. Same weekday, same time, same market, same setup, after a loss. The calendar view exists for this — thirty trades laid out together make repetition visible in a way a list never does.
5. Change one thing. Rewriting everything after a bad month resets your sample to zero and guarantees you learn nothing from the next one either.
6. Write down what you changed and when, so next month's review has something to test.

How long this should take

A single-trade review is a minute or two while it is fresh. A monthly review is perhaps half an hour. If it takes longer, the journal is probably recording things nobody reads — cut the fields you never refer back to.

Open the calendar and review a month

Next

R multiple, win rate and profit factor explained covers the numbers a monthly review produces, and how to keep a trading journal covers what to record so the review has something to work with.