Most traders who keep a journal never really read it. The trades go in, the screenshots pile up, and the only number anyone looks at on Friday is the week's P&L. A green week feels like proof the process works. A red week feels like proof something needs to change — usually the strategy, usually in a hurry.

A weekly trading review is the step that makes a journal worth keeping. It is not a feeling about the week; it is a short, repeatable routine that answers three questions: What actually happened, in risk units? Did I trade my plan? And what is the one thing I will do differently next week?

This guide gives you a complete process you can run in about 45 minutes, with a template at the end. It is written for futures traders — NQ, ES and their micro contracts — but it works for any market where you define risk before you enter.

Why Review Weekly (Not Daily, Not Monthly)

Each review cadence answers a different question, and mixing them up is where most review habits go wrong.

A daily review is too close to the outcome. At the end of a session you are still carrying the emotion of the last trade. A quick end-of-day check is useful for logging trades accurately and noting what happened, but it is a poor moment to draw conclusions. One day is also too few trades to tell a pattern from noise.

A monthly review is too far from the behaviour. By the time a month is over, the details of why you took a trade on the 4th are gone, and a habit that cost you money in week one has had three more weeks to repeat itself.

A weekly review sits in between. You have enough trades to see repeated behaviour, the trades are recent enough to remember the context, and you get a fresh week to test one change. It also matches how many traders already plan: a weekend gap, a new set of scheduled news releases, and a clean start on Monday.

The weekly review mainly judges your process. Whether your strategy has an edge is a question for a much larger sample of trades — we will come back to that.

Before You Start: What Your Journal Needs

A review can only be as good as the data behind it. For every trade, you need:

If you are not sure which fields are worth the effort, What to Actually Log in a Trading Journal covers the essentials and what to stop recording.

You also need your written trading plan — the rules you are reviewing against. Without written rules, "did I follow my plan?" has no answer. If you trade a prop firm evaluation, How to Build a Trading Plan for a Prop Firm Challenge walks through what that plan should contain.

The Weekly Trading Review: 7 Steps in About 45 Minutes

Do the review at the same time every week, away from live charts. Saturday morning or Sunday afternoon works for most futures traders. Keep the steps in order: the numbers first, the interpretation second, the change last.

Step 1: Close the books (5 minutes)

Before you analyse anything, make sure the week is complete and accurate:

Missing trades are the most common reason a review lies. The trades you skip logging are usually the impulsive ones — exactly the trades the review exists to catch.

Step 2: Read the week in R, not dollars (10 minutes)

Write down a small, fixed set of numbers every week:

Metric What it tells you
Number of trades Whether you traded your normal frequency or overtraded
Net result in R The week's outcome, independent of position size
Win rate How often you won — meaningless on its own
Average win and average loss, in R Whether winners and losers are the size your plan assumes
Expectancy in R per trade Win rate × average win − loss rate × average loss
Largest loss, in R Whether any loss went beyond your planned −1R

Dollars are useful for your account statement, but they are a bad review metric because they change whenever your size changes. A −$400 day on two contracts and a −$400 day on one contract are very different days. R removes that distortion. For the reasoning behind each number, see Trading Expectancy, What Is a Good Win Rate in Trading? and What Is Profit Factor.

Two rules keep this step honest:

  1. Record, don't judge yet. A week of 10–20 trades is far too small to say whether a strategy works. Write the numbers down and move on.
  2. Look hardest at the largest loss. Any loss meaningfully beyond −1R means something other than the plan happened: a moved stop, an oversized position, a missing stop, or slippage through a news release. Each one has a different fix.

Step 3: Audit rule compliance (10 minutes)

This is the step most traders skip, and the one that pays the most.

Go through every trade and label it:

Then calculate the net R and the trade count for each group. The question is not "was the week green?" but "what did my rule-following trades produce, and what did my rule-breaking trades cost?"

This split often changes the meaning of a week completely. A green week can contain a handful of rule-breaking trades that happened to work — a habit that will eventually cost more than it earned. A red week can consist entirely of well-executed trades that lost, which is variance, not a problem to fix. Why Traders Break Their Own Rules goes deeper into measuring the cost of violations, and Why Tracking PnL Alone Is Not Enough explains why outcome and process have to be judged separately.

Step 4: Review your exits and your biggest losses (5 minutes)

Look at two specific places where results leak:

Losses beyond −1R. For each one, write down why it happened. "Moved my stop because the level looked like it would hold" is a different problem from "traded three contracts instead of two". If losses keep running past your stop, the fix is in your rules and your execution, not your entries.

Winners closed before the plan said so. Compare each winner's actual R with its planned target. If your average winner is well below the target you planned, you may be cutting winners short — and quietly lowering your expectancy even when your win rate looks fine. How to Stop Cutting Your Winners Short explains how to measure what early exits cost.

Step 5: Look for one pattern (5 minutes)

Now look for repetition. Check the rule-breaking and partly-followed trades from Step 3 and ask:

You are looking for one pattern that showed up more than once, not a complete psychological profile. If the week was simply a run of valid losing trades, check whether the streak is within what your win rate implies before changing anything — Losing Streaks in Trading shows how to tell bad luck from a broken strategy.

Step 6: Choose one change and write it as a rule (5 minutes)

Most reviews fail here. Traders finish with a list of eight resolutions, follow none of them, and repeat the same week.

Pick one change, based on the pattern from Step 5, and write it so that next week you can check it with a yes or a no.

Vague intentions versus testable rules:

Vague Testable
"Be more patient after losses" "After a losing trade, no new entry for 15 minutes"
"Stop overtrading" "Maximum 4 trades per session; stop after 2 losses"
"Respect my stops" "Stop is placed with the entry order and never moved further away"
"Let winners run" "No manual exit before the first target unless my written exit rule is triggered"

Add the rule to your written plan, so it becomes something your next review can check.

Step 7: Plan the next week (5 minutes)

Finish by setting up next week, while the lessons are fresh:

An Illustrative Example Week

The figures below are an illustrative example, not real trader data — but this is what a typical review page looks like.

A trader takes 12 trades on MNQ over the week, risking a fixed amount per trade:

At first glance: a slightly green week, nothing to worry about.

The rule audit tells a different story:

Group Trades Net R
Followed the plan 9 +5.0R
Broke the plan 3 −4.5R

The three rule-breaking trades were the −2.1R loss (stop moved after entry), the −1.4R loss (an oversized re-entry), and one −1.0R loss on a setup that wasn't in the plan. Two of the three came within minutes of a previous loss.

The trader's plan was producing results this week; the trader's reactions to losses nearly erased them. The one change for next week: "After a losing trade, no new entry for 15 minutes, and the next trade must pass the full checklist." Next Saturday, the review will check one thing first — how many trades were entered within 15 minutes of a loss.

Notice what the trader did not do: change the strategy, add an indicator, or decide the setup "stopped working" after one week.

What to Leave for the Monthly Review

Some questions need more trades than one week can provide. Move these to a monthly or quarterly review, once you have a meaningful sample:

As a rough guide, conclusions drawn from fewer than about 30 trades in a group deserve a lot of caution, and many traders want considerably more before changing a strategy. The weekly review protects your process; the monthly review evaluates your edge.

Common Weekly Review Mistakes

  1. Reviewing P&L only. The result without the rule audit tells you how the week felt, not what caused it.
  2. Skipping the review after a green week. Rule-breaking trades that worked are the most expensive kind, because they teach the wrong lesson.
  3. Changing the strategy every week. One week of results is mostly noise. Change behaviour weekly; change strategy only on evidence.
  4. Making five changes at once. If you change everything, next week's review cannot tell you what worked.
  5. Not logging the bad trades. An incomplete journal produces a flattering review.
  6. Reviewing on Monday morning before the open. Do it with time and distance, not ten minutes before the bell.

A Weekly Trading Review Template

Copy this into your notes and fill it in every week:

  1. Week of: ___
  2. Trades logged: ___ (all trades included? yes / no)
  3. Net R: ___ · Win rate: % · Average win: R · Average loss: ___R
  4. Expectancy: R per trade · Largest loss: R — reason: ___
  5. Followed the plan: ___ trades, R · Partly followed: ___ trades, R · Broke the plan: ___ trades, ___R
  6. Winners closed before target: ___ — reasons: ___
  7. The pattern this week: ___
  8. Last week's rule — did I follow it? yes / no — evidence: ___
  9. One rule for next week: ___
  10. Next week's risk per trade: ___ · daily loss limit: ___ · key events: ___

Item 8 is what turns a set of reviews into a feedback loop: every week, you check the previous week's change before choosing a new one.

Doing Your Weekly Review in TradeProof AI

You can run this whole process with a spreadsheet. The difficult part is not the arithmetic; it is the rule audit in Step 3, because judging your own trades honestly, every week, is hard.

TradeProof AI is a trading journal built around this kind of review:

If you want to try the review on your own trades, you can start a 7-day free trial — no credit card and no broker connection required.

The Short Version