Weekly And Monthly Review Routines

The interesting row is not the win rate. It is that trade count rose 37% while rule breaks nearly tripled. Those two move together for a reason: the third month was traded harder and less carefully, and that explains the expectancy figure without any need to suspect the strategy. Had trade count stayed flat while expectancy fell, the conclusion would be the opposite one, and the action would be to examine the setups instead of the discipline.

Three months is the minimum for this table to say anything. A single month of forty trades moves around enough that any pair of months can be arranged into a story, and a story from two data points is the most common reason a working plan gets replaced.

What neither cadence can see

Both reviews are blind to regime. A method built for trending conditions can hand back four months in a row with nothing wrong with it, and the monthly table will look like steady deterioration. Add one line to the monthly on what the market actually did, whether your instruments trended or ranged and whether average ranges were expanding or contracting, so the numbers still have context when you read them back a year later.

They are also blind to costs unless you put costs in. Spread, commission and swap do not appear in an R column, so a month that looks flat can be meaningfully negative once financing on held positions is counted. Keep a running cost line in the monthly and read expectancy net of it, the way the risk rules treat every other unavoidable drain on an account.

Defending the slot

This routine fails in one specific way: it gets skipped in the weeks that matter. Nobody skips the review after a good week. The review after a bad one, which is the week holding the rule breaks, the oversized position and the revenge trade, is the one that gets postponed and then quietly dropped.

1. Same time, in the calendar, with an alarm. Friday at the close and the last Sunday of the month are as good a pair as any.
2. A fixed template. The same six lines every week means a bad week takes the same twenty minutes as a good one.
3. One decision limit. The monthly may change at most one thing in the plan. A review that changes five is a rewrite, and a rewritten plan has no history to measure against.

Keep every completed review. A year of them is a record of how your thinking moved, which is the only way to notice that you have retired the same setup twice and reinstated it once, or that the drawdown you are currently sitting in is shallower than one you traded through without much trouble last spring. The drawdown calculator puts the current one in proportion, and the old reviews tell you how you behaved the last time.