Practice
Reviewing a period of trades
“How do people actually review their trades, and what are they looking at?”
A review is a pass over a closed period — a week, a month — reading what the record says and writing down what it showed. It is a separate activity from logging trades, and it is the one that turns a book of entries into something that has been read.
In short
Review a period that is finished, look at the trades the record flags rather than the ones memory offers, and write the conclusion where the next review will find it.
Why a closed period
A period still in progress cannot be reviewed, only monitored, and the two produce different writing. A running week invites conclusions about trades whose outcome is not yet known; a closed one has a fixed set of facts in it.
It also makes the exercise repeatable. Reviews of comparable periods can be read in sequence, and a note from six weeks ago is only useful if it describes the same kind of window as this one.
Which trades get a second look
Memory selects badly — it offers the largest loss and the most recent trade, which are rarely the informative ones. A record can select on properties instead:
- Trades with no notes, no setup tag or no stop recorded. These are the entries that make every statistic less reliable, and they are cheapest to fix while the period is recent.
- Trades whose MFE was far above their result — what was reached and given back.
- Trades tagged with a mistake, grouped by which mistake, rather than read one at a time.
- Outliers in size: anything much larger than the book's own median position, whether it won or lost.
- The trades taken immediately after a loss, as a group.
What gets written down
The output of a review is prose, not a score. A number that summarised the period is already in the reports; what is not stored anywhere is the reading of it — what the period looked like, what was repeated, and what specifically to watch in the next one.
Writing it against the period rather than against a trade matters, because the observations that matter across a week are rarely about a single trade. A note attached to one entry is found again only by someone reading that entry.
Editing the record while reviewing it
A review pass is usually also a correction pass: filling in a missing tag, adding the lesson a trade produced, marking a mistake that was obvious afterwards. This is the last point at which the context is still recoverable, and a book corrected weeks later is a book of reconstructions.
Questions
- Weekly or monthly?
- Both are used, and they surface different things: a week is close enough that the context is still recoverable, a month holds enough trades for the groupings to have anything in them. What matters more than the choice is that the same window is used consistently, so periods are comparable.
- What if the period had very few trades?
- Then the statistics for it mean very little, and the review is mostly a completeness pass over the record. That is still worth doing — the reason the numbers are thin is itself something the next review will want written down.
- Should a review change the plan?
- That is entirely the trader's call and outside what a record can tell you. What the record supports is a description of what happened; what to do about it is a decision, and journaling software has no business making it.
Calculate it
In the app
- The weekly review — a guided pass over a periodWork through a week or a month: what still needs rating, the trades worth a second look, three questions, and one thing to do differently.
- Journaling and reviewing tradesAdd notes, ratings, mistakes, and lessons to build discipline.
- Trading goals — targets on your own numbersSet a target per period, read progress, pace and streaks, and understand a loss or drawdown cap.
- Trade sequence & emotional stateWhat the Sequence card measures — trades taken after a loss, inside a losing streak, or past your daily loss limit — and how emotions are grouped.
Keep reading
Ledger of Alpha is the record these measurements are computed from. See the full product
Keep the record it all comes from
These measurements need a complete book of trades behind them. A free account gives you somewhere to keep one.