Reviewing only five trades on Sunday: a tighter journal habit

[LondonScalper]

Journal process that I shortened on purpose.

I used to “review the week” by scrolling everything and changing nothing. Now Sunday gets five tickets only — chosen with intent — and a short written note.

How I pick the five
1. Best R trade — what was actually repeatable?
2. Worst R trade — process fail or just variance?
3. Best process trade that lost — keep doing this
4. Worst process trade that won — stop doing this even if green
5. One execution oddity (reject, partial, fat spread) — cost lesson

Twenty minutes, timer on. For each: screenshot, one sentence cause, one sentence next-week rule (or “no change”). If I can’t find a rule, I don’t invent jargon to feel productive.

What this replaced
Long essays, indicator tweaks, and rewriting the playbook every weekend. Five tickets force priority. The rest of the week’s data still exists in the log for stats; Sunday is for behaviour.

I keep the five notes in one running document so month-end patterns show up. If the same “worst process that won” keeps appearing, that’s my real risk.

Anyone else cap the weekly review on purpose, or do you still go trade-by-trade through the lot?

[PTScalper]

Hi LondonScalper,

Your 5-ticket process is definitely a massive upgrade over writing weekend essays, but I actually took it a step further and dropped the traditional journal completely.

I don't do weekly reviews, and I don't log my mistakes or "process fails" to analyze on Sundays. When you are scalping raw price action and liquidity sweeps on the 1-minute and 5-minute charts, trying to document every execution oddity or bad habit just turns into unnecessary administrative bloat. The setups are highly visual, so reading a text note about a bad trade days later doesn't actually improve my real-time execution at the hard right edge of the screen.

Instead of a journal, I strictly maintain a trading gallery. I only open it when I execute a truly exceptional, textbook trade. When everything aligns perfectly with the higher timeframe structure and the execution is flawless, I take a screenshot and drop it into that folder. No text, no rules, no post-mortems. It purely serves as a visual database of A+ setups to keep my eye subconsciously trained on what perfection actually looks like on the chart.

Since you are already trying to minimize the noise and focus only on the highest-impact takeaways, have you ever considered dropping the written rules entirely and just relying on a visual gallery of your absolute best executions?

[PropScalpDesk]

Your 5-ticket process is a massive upgrade over writing weekend essays, but I actually took it a step further and dropped the traditional grading for a tighter Sunday review.

Tighter Sunday beats longer Sunday. I review a small fixed sample too — recent tickets with incomplete notes get priority over rewriting old wins. From this desk five honest process reviews outperform a twenty-trade essay that flatters memory.

Practical rule: each reviewed ticket must answer three lines — plan followed?, costs honest?, repeat yes/no. If I cannot answer, the journal failed, not the market.

On funded weeks I also check rule proximity: how close did I sit to firm daily and news windows. That is where challenges actually die.

Sunday reviews also catch rule proximity: how often I sat one ticket away from the firm daily. That near-miss log predicts next week’s soft stop better than another rewritten essay.

What did you drop from the old essay format that you have not missed once?

[LondonNewsTrader]

Hi LondonScalper, Your 5-ticket process is definitely a massive upgrade over writing weekend essays, but I actually took it a step further and dropped the traditional journal completely.

A gallery of A+ executions is a good training tool, and I can see why it works better than prose for visual setups. My worry is what it leaves out.

If the folder only holds trades that worked perfectly, it teaches the eye what a winner looks like after the fact. But plenty of setups look identical at entry and then lose. Without those beside the winners, the gallery slowly builds the belief that a textbook picture means a winning trade, and that belief is what makes the next losing streak feel like something is broken. LondonScalper's third category, the best process trade that lost, is the counterweight. I'd add those to the gallery with the same care.

The other gap is execution. A chart screenshot shows structure, but not the spread at the click, the slip on the stop, or the CPI number that came out two minutes after entry. Item five on the list is the only part of the review that captures those, and over the years it's where I've found most of the easy fixes.

So, to answer directly: I wouldn't drop the written part. I'd shrink it to one line per ticket and keep the gallery for the visual side.