A weekly trading review you can finish in 20 minutes

A simple routine for turning a week of trades into one thing to repeat and one thing to change, with the checks that matter and the traps that waste your time.

Why review weekly

Reviewing after every trade makes you react to noise, and reviewing once a month is too late to fix a habit that is costing you money. A short weekly review is long enough to see a pattern and short enough to act on it while it is still fresh.

Before you start

Have all of the week's closed trades in one place, with your notes. If you are typing them in by hand, the free journal template has a Weekly review sheet. If a tool journals them for you, that preparation step disappears, which is the whole point of tracking trades automatically.

The 20-minute checklist

Step	Time	What to do
1. Numbers	3 min	Trades taken, net result, win rate, average win and loss. Compare with last week, but do not read too much into one week.
2. Rule check	4 min	Go through each trade and mark whether you followed your plan. Add up what the plan-breaking trades cost or made.
3. Best and worst	5 min	Read your notes on the best and worst trade. Was the worst a bad setup, bad execution, or normal variance?
4. Patterns	4 min	Slice the week by symbol, session or hour, weekday and setup. Where do you make money and where do you give it back?
5. One change	3 min	Choose one thing to repeat and one thing to change. Not five.
6. Next week	1 min	Write up to three rules for next week, in words you will actually read before the open.

Questions worth asking

Did I take any trade I would not have taken if I had written the plan down first?
Did I move a stop loss, add to a loser or size up after a loss?
Did I trade outside the hours I said I would?
Which losses were good decisions that simply did not work out, and which were mistakes?
What did I do on my best day that I did not do on my worst?

Slicing your trades

Patterns hide until you group trades. The useful cuts are symbol, session or hour of day, weekday, setup, position size, and followed-plan versus not. In a spreadsheet, filter the column and read the profit total. In a Notion trades database you can group or filter by properties such as symbol and direction, and any notes you write on a trade stay attached to it.

Traps to avoid

Judging a strategy on a few trades. One week is rarely enough. See how many trades you need before trusting a number.
Changing everything at once. You will not know what helped.
Skipping the plan-breaking trades. They are the most useful ones to read.
Editing the rules mid-week. Make changes in the review, not in the middle of a drawdown.

Keeping it up

Pick a fixed slot, such as Saturday morning, and keep the review short enough that you will really do it. A 20-minute review done every week beats a two-hour review done twice. This guide is about record keeping and habits, not trading advice.

Related guides

Make the review easier: let your trades log themselves

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