How to Review Your Trades: A 30-Minute Weekly Routine

To review your trades, set aside 30 minutes once a week, check your key numbers, read your journal notes for patterns, and choose one specific change for the next week. The goal is not to judge individual trades, it is to find the repeatable behaviors that cost or earn you money.

Below is a routine you can copy, with the exact questions to ask and a worked example. This is education, not financial advice, and reviewing does not guarantee better results.

Why a weekly review matters

Keeping a journal without reviewing it is like collecting receipts and never opening the folder. The entries only pay off when you read them together.

A weekly review finds patterns (one bad trade is noise, five with the same mistake is a pattern), separates skill from luck, and keeps changes small so you fix one thing at a time.

If you are not logging trades yet, start with how to keep a trading journal and come back.

Before you start: set up the review

Pick a fixed time, such as Saturday morning or Sunday evening, when markets are closed and you are not emotional about a recent loss. Have these ready:

• Your journal entries for the week.
• Chart screenshots and your written trading rules.
• A place to write your review notes.

Do not review mid-session. You will judge trades by how you feel, not by what the data says.

The 30-minute routine

Step 1: Check the numbers (5 minutes)

Pull together a few figures for the week:

• Number of trades.
• Net result in currency and in R.
• Win rate.
• Average winner and average loser.
• Largest loss versus your planned risk.
• Number of trades where you broke a rule.

Win rate alone can mislead, so always look at the size of winners and losers beside it. Win rate vs profit factor explains why, and the trading expectancy formula shows how to combine win rate and payoff into one number.

If you use R, it makes this step quick. R is your result divided by what you planned to risk, so a trade that made $200 on $100 risk is +2R.

Step 2: Group and sort (7 minutes)

Now slice the week's trades by categories. You are looking for where the money was made and lost.

• By setup: Which setup performed best and worst?
• By time of day: Do you lose more in the first 15 minutes, at lunch, or near the close?
• By direction or instrument: Are longs better than shorts? Is one market dragging you down?
• By plan adherence: Compare trades where you followed your plan with trades where you did not.

That last cut is often the most revealing. Suppose you took 10 trades in a week. Seven followed your rules and netted +$310. Three broke your rules and netted -$280. Your overall result is +$30, which looks like a flat week. But the rule-following trades were clearly profitable, and the rule-breaking trades erased almost all of it. The fix is behavior, not strategy.

Tags make this much faster. If you tag entries as "followed plan", "chased", "moved stop", "oversized", or "revenge", you can count them in seconds. In Momentra, journal notes support tags, and the analytics overview helps you see performance without building formulas.

Step 3: Read your notes (8 minutes)

Numbers tell you what. Notes tell you why. Skim your entries for the week and look for repeated words and feelings.

Ask yourself:

• Which emotions show up most? Fear, boredom, FOMO, frustration?
• Did I trade after a loss more aggressively than usual?
• Did I enter without a clear plan?
• Did I hold losers longer than I held winners?
• Did I take trades outside my defined setups?

If you spot a loss followed by a larger, faster trade, that is a revenge pattern. How to stop revenge trading covers practical fixes.

Step 4: Study the best and worst trades (5 minutes)

Pick one best trade and one worst trade from the week. Look at the charts, and ask:

Best trade: What exactly was good about it, the setup, the patience, the sizing? Was it good process or just luck?

Worst trade: Was it a bad outcome of a good decision, or a bad decision? Where did I first deviate from my plan?

A good trade that loses should not change your approach. A bad trade that wins should not make you feel clever.

Step 5: Choose one change (5 minutes)

This step is where most reviews fail. People write ten resolutions and follow none. Pick one.

A good change is:

• Specific: "Do not trade the first 10 minutes after the open."
• Measurable: You can count it next week.
• Within your control: It is about your behavior, not the market.
• Small: One rule, not a new system.

Weak: "Be more disciplined." Strong: "If I hit my stop, I wait 15 minutes before placing another order."

Write the change at the top of next week's page so you see it before the first trade.

Questions to ask in every weekly review

Copy these into your journal as a standing checklist.

1. How often did I follow my plan this week?
2. Was my largest loss the size I planned?
3. Which setup made the most money, and which lost the most?
4. What emotion drove my worst decision?
5. Did I take trades I should have skipped, or skip trades I should have taken?
6. What is the one thing I will change next week, and what did I do well?

A worked example

Here is a fictional week, with made-up numbers, run through the routine.

Step 1: Numbers. 12 trades, 5 winners and 7 losers. Win rate: 5 / 12, about 42 percent. Winners totaled $640, losers totaled $520. Net: $640 - $520 = +$120. Average winner: $640 / 5 = $128. Average loser: $520 / 7, about $74.

Step 2: Group. Three of the seven losers were taken in the last hour of the day, after a lunch-hour loss, and were larger than normal. Those three lost $330 combined. The other four losers totaled $190.

Step 3: Notes. Words like "bored", "make it back", and "one more" appear in all three late trades.

Step 4: Extremes. Best trade: a patient breakout held to target for +$210. Worst trade: a late-day oversized entry for -$140.

Step 5: Change. After any loss exceeding my planned risk, I stop trading for 30 minutes. If it happens twice in a day, I am done for the day.

The insight: the strategy was fine. Without those three late trades, the week would have been +$450 ($120 + $330). One narrow behavior was responsible for most of the damage, and now you have a concrete rule to address it. One week of data is a small sample, so confirm any pattern over several weeks before treating it as fact.

Add a monthly check

Once a month, zoom out. With 20 to 30 or more trades, ask:

• Is my expectancy positive after fees?
• Is my average loss close to my planned risk?
• Has my change from the last four weeks helped?
• Do I still believe in each setup? Judge it on a meaningful sample, not one bad week.

Tools that make reviewing faster

You can run this entire routine in a spreadsheet, though it takes effort to build the grouping and charts. Excel vs trading journal software discusses the tradeoff, and best trading journal software compares options.

Momentra's free plan includes trade analytics and a performance overview, plus journal notes with tags. On Pro, AI insights inside the journal can help point out patterns, and the plan includes 200 AI requests per month. Treat AI output as a prompt for your judgment, not a verdict.

FAQ

How often should I review my trades?

Review weekly for a quick check of behavior and results, and monthly for a deeper look at whether your strategy still works. If you trade many times a day, a short daily glance at rule-breaks can also help.

How long should a weekly trading review take?

About 30 minutes is enough for most traders. If it takes much longer, your journal has too many fields or you are trying to fix too many things at once.

What should I look for when reviewing my trades?

Look for repeated mistakes, the setups that work best and worst, and the times of day you trade poorly. Compare trades where you followed your plan with trades where you did not.

Should I review winning trades too?

Yes. A winning trade may have broken your rules and just got lucky, and reviewing it prevents you from reinforcing a bad habit. Winners also show you what good execution looks like so you can repeat it.

How many trades do I need before reviewing means anything?

A single week of data is a small sample, so treat early findings as hypotheses. Behavior patterns, like moving stops, show up quickly. Statistical conclusions about a setup need a larger sample, often dozens of trades.

Keep the loop small and consistent

A weekly review does not need to be long or fancy. Check the numbers, find the pattern, read the notes, study the extremes, and pick one change. Do that every week and your journal becomes a coach instead of an archive. This is general education and not financial advice.

If you want the numbers and notes in one place, Try Momentra free and run your first weekly review this weekend.