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Glossary

Post-trade review

A post-trade review is a structured look back at a trade or session that separates the quality of the decision from the outcome.

The central question is not whether the trade made money but whether it was a good decision given what you knew. Four combinations exist: good decision with a good result, good decision with a bad result, bad decision with a good result, and bad decision with a bad result. The middle two are the easy ones to misjudge, and they are what a review exists for.

A workable review is brief and repeated. Was the setup one in the plan? Was the stop set before entry and respected? Was the size as planned? How did I feel before and after? What, if anything, would I change next time? Five questions answered honestly after every trade are worth more than an hour of analysis once a month.

Reviews should also happen at a larger scale. Weekly, look across trades: which setups, sessions or states produced the best and worst results in R? Patterns appear only across many trades, never inside one.

Write the review before you check the day's total if you can. Seeing the outcome first colours how the decision looks.

The output should be one change, small enough to try next week, and a way to see afterwards whether it happened.

In Trader Reflect

Weekly Reflection

Reflect compares this week with last week on behaviour, such as plan adherence and sizing, and reports only changes above a noise floor.

See what is inside

Read more

The Post-Trade Review Checklist: Judge the Decision, Not the ResultA two-minute checklist to review each trade by decision quality, a twenty-minute weekly review, and the usual ways reviews fail.

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Educational content, not financial advice. Trading involves risk of loss.