How to Review Your Trades Weekly: A 45-Minute Routine

A weekly trade review takes about 45 minutes: bring the week's trades up to date, read the numbers in R, find which setups paid and which mistakes cost the most, then choose one rule to fix next week. The aim isn't to relive every trade. It's to make one specific, measurable change at a time, and check next week whether it worked. Here's a routine you can follow every weekend.

#Before you start: complete the week's data (10 minutes)

A review is only as good as the record. First:

1. Bring in every trade from every account: import or sync your platform's history, including evaluation and funded accounts.
2. Fill the gaps. Each trade needs its initial stop (for R), its setup, a rules check, how you felt and a short note.
3. Grade each trade on process, not outcome. Did it meet the setup's rules?
4. Add screenshots of any trade you want to look at closely.

If you can't remember why you took a trade, that's a finding in itself: write "no reason recorded" and count it.

#Step 1: Read the week in numbers (5 minutes)

Write down:

• Number of trades and days traded
• Net P&L and total R
• Win rate, average win in R and average loss in R
• Expectancy: average R per trade
• Largest loss in R (anything well past −1R is worth a look)
• Fees, as a share of gross P&L

Then compare with the last four weeks. One week is noise; the trend is what matters. If you're new to R, see how to calculate R multiple and what is expectancy in trading.

#Step 2: Which setups paid? (10 minutes)

Group the week's trades by setup. Here's an illustrative week:

Setup	Trades	Win rate	Total R	Average R
Opening range break	9	44%	+4.6R	+0.51R
Pullback	6	33%	−1.4R	−0.23R
No setup	4	25%	−3.2R	−0.80R
Week	19	37%	0.0R	0.00R

The week's total is flat, but the detail isn't. One setup made +4.6R; trades taken with no setup gave most of it back. Looking only at P&L would have hidden both.

Two cautions:

• Small samples mislead. Six trades of a setup is too few to judge. Add the week to the setup's running record and look at that.
• "No setup" is always a row. Trades you can't name a setup for deserve their own line, every week. If that row is often long, your setup playbook may need writing down.

#Step 3: Rank your mistakes by cost (10 minutes)

Name each mistake the same way every time, so they can be counted. Then put a cost on each, in R:

• Moved stop: how much worse the trade was than −1R. A trade closed at −1.8R cost 0.8R.
• No setup: the whole result of the trade, since it shouldn't have been taken.
• Early exit: the R you'd have made holding to your planned exit, if you can tell from the chart.
• Oversize: the extra loss caused by the extra contracts.

Mistake	Times	Cost
Traded with no setup	4	3.2R
Moved stop	2	1.9R
Early exit	3	1.5R

Sort by cost, not by how often it happened. A mistake you made twice can cost more than one you made five times.

Then compare trades where you kept every rule with trades where you broke one. If the rule-kept trades average clearly better, you've got evidence for your own rules, which helps more than willpower.

#Step 4: Check time and feelings (5 minutes)

• By hour: are your losses bunched at a particular time? If you trade US futures from the UK, look at the first minutes after the New York open (usually 14:30 UK) separately from the rest of the session.
• By day: is one weekday consistently worse?
• By feeling: how did trades tagged frustrated, rushed or fear of missing out perform against calm ones?
• After a loss: how did the next trade do? If trades straight after a loss do badly, see how to stop revenge trading.

You're looking for patterns that repeat across weeks, not one bad afternoon.

#Step 5: Look closely at two trades (5 minutes)

Pick your best trade by process and your worst trade by process, not by P&L. Replay the chart for each:

• What did you see at entry? Was it in your plan?
• Where was your stop, and why there?
• What would you do the same, and what differently?

Write one sentence for each. These are the trades worth remembering.

#Step 6: Choose one rule to fix (5 minutes)

Take the costliest mistake from Step 3 and write one rule that addresses it. Make it specific enough to check with a yes or no. In the example week, that might be:

Only trade setups that are written in my plan. If I can't name the setup, I don't take the trade.

Then decide how you'll measure it next week, for example "number of no-setup trades: target zero". Put the rule somewhere you'll see it before each session.

One rule a week is enough. Changing five things at once means you'll never know which one helped.

#A weekly review template

Copy this into your notes:

1. Trades, days, net P&L, total R, expectancy:
2. Compared with the last four weeks:
3. Best setup this week, and its running record:
4. Weakest setup, and its running record:
5. Costliest mistake, times and cost in R:
6. Rule-kept average R vs rule-broken average R:
7. Time or feeling pattern noticed:
8. Best trade by process, and why:
9. Worst trade by process, and why:
10. Last week's rule: kept? Did it help?
11. This week's one rule, and how I'll measure it:

If you trade a prop firm account, add each account's distance to its limits; see how to journal a prop firm evaluation.

#Common weekly review mistakes

• Judging a setup on one week. Use its running record.
• Reviewing only losing trades. Winners that broke your rules teach the most expensive lessons.
• Skipping good weeks. That's when bad habits are easiest to miss.
• Too many changes. One rule, measured, beats a list of resolutions.

#Monthly: zoom out

Once a month, run the same steps on the whole month. Check each setup's running expectancy, whether last month's rules stuck, and whether your average loss is still close to −1R. That's where you see real trends. New to journaling? Start with what a trading journal is.

Marble does most of this arithmetic for you. Imported trades wait in Needs review until you grade them, and Analytics shows which setups pay, plan kept against plan broken, P&L by feeling and by hour, with a week-by-week view in the journal.

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Marble turns your week of trades into setups, mistakes and R, so your review starts at the questions, not the spreadsheet. Try Marble.

Marble is a trading journal. Nothing here is financial advice.