Weekly Journal Review: The Questions That Matter

[Fairman]

Journaling individual trades is only half the process. The other half — arguably the more valuable half — is sitting down on a consistent weekly basis and actually reviewing what the accumulated data is telling you.

Set aside a specific time each week, ideally when the market is closed and you're not under any active trading pressure, and work through these four core questions using your journal data:

What was my win rate this week? Calculate it precisely, not from memory or general impression.

What was my average reward-to-risk ratio across all trades? This tells you whether your actual execution matches the R:R your strategy was designed around.

Which specific setup type performed best, and which performed worst? This is where the setup-type field from your journal entries pays off directly, letting you see performance broken down by strategy rather than lumped together.

Did I follow my written plan on every single trade, or did I deviate — and if I deviated, what was the actual outcome of that specific deviation? This last question is often the most revealing, since it directly connects discipline (or lack of it) to real results, rather than treating "following the plan" as an abstract virtue disconnected from actual P&L.

These four questions, worked through consistently every single week, are what turn a trade journal from a passive diary into an active, ongoing source of genuine trading edge.

[LondonScalper]

Weekly review questions beat daily over-journaling.

Mine are basically: which rule broke most, which pair failed cost, which session I should have skipped, what one change I’ll test next week. Everything else is noise.

What’s the one weekly question that actually changed your behavior in the last month?

[PropScalpDesk]

Weekly review questions that change behaviour

Daily logs without a weekly synthesis become diaries. Once a week, market closed, I answer a short set that forces decisions rather than storytelling:

• Which rule saved the most R this week?
• Which rule break cost the most R?
• Did costs rise in a specific hour or pair?
• What will I forbid next week in one written sentence?

Full-time in Frankfurt, this is scheduling, not inspiration. I put it on the calendar like an appointment with the person who pays the bills — future me. On prop weeks I add one line: any near-miss on daily loss or consistency language that I almost talked myself into ignoring.

I keep the weekly answers in the same document week after week so patterns are obvious. If “costs in the first hour” appears three times, that is not a diary entry — that is a standing order to change filters.

Which weekly question actually changed your size or session last month — and did you write the change as a rule, or only remember it?