The Friday Review, Closing the Week Honestly

[Fairman]

The Friday Review, Closing the Week Honestly

The week ends, and most traders simply close the platform and forget. A short Friday review turns each week into a lesson that carries forward.

Here is a 30-minute template.

1. Close all trades or confirm weekend plans. Safety first.

2. List the week's trades. Include screenshots.

3. Calculate the numbers. Total R, number of trades, win rate, and rule-following percentage.

4. Ask three questions:
- What did I do well?
- What did I do poorly?
- What surprised me?

5. Identify the best trade and the worst trade. Why were they good or bad?

6. Look for patterns. Time of day, emotions, pairs, setups.

7. Choose one improvement for next week. Make it specific and measurable.

8. Celebrate one thing. Even small wins, such as following your plan on a difficult day.

9. Write a short note to your future self. One or two sentences about the week.

10. Disconnect. Do something unrelated to trading.

Benefits:

- Better learning from experience
- Reduced emotional carryover
- Clear data for monthly reviews
- A sense of closure

A week without review is a week partly wasted.

Give yourself the gift of reflection, and let the weekend be a real break.

[LondonNewsTrader]

One item is missing from the template, and for me it is the most useful part of the Friday session: next week's calendar. Mark the market-moving releases for the currencies you trade, note any bank holidays that will thin out a session, and decide in advance which days you'll trade lighter or not at all.

Doing it on Friday, when there is no position and no pressure, works much better than discovering on Wednesday morning that the Fed decision is that evening and you have a swing trade open into it.

The rule-following percentage in point 3 is also the right number to put first. A losing week with full rule-following is a normal week. A winning week at 60 percent compliance is a problem that just hasn't cost anything yet.

[Fairman]

The hardest question in the Friday review for me is which trade I would take back. I try to answer it even on good weeks. There's almost always one, and it's usually the one I took when I was bored. Good weeks are actually the most dangerous time to skip this, because a profit hides sloppy decisions. A trade that broke a rule and happened to win teaches you to break that rule again. So I mark rule breaking winners just as clearly as the losers in the journal. If over a month the same kind of trade keeps appearing as the one I'd take back, that's the thing to fix next, whatever the totals say.

[PTScalper]

The Friday Review, Closing the Week Honestly

The week ends, and most traders simply close the platform and forget. A short Friday review turns each week into a lesson that carries forward.

Here is a 30-minute template.

1. Close all trades or confirm weekend plans. Safety first.

2. List the week's trades. Include screenshots.

3. Calculate the numbers. Total R, number of trades, win rate, and rule-following percentage.

4. Ask three questions:
- What did I do well?
- What did I do poorly?
- What surprised me?

5. Identify the best trade and the worst trade. Why were they good or bad?

6. Look for patterns. Time of day, emotions, pairs, setups.

7. Choose one improvement for next week. Make it specific and measurable.

8. Celebrate one thing. Even small wins, such as following your plan on a difficult day.

9. Write a short note to your future self. One or two sentences about the week.

10. Disconnect. Do something unrelated to trading.

Benefits:

- Better learning from experience
- Reduced emotional carryover
- Clear data for monthly reviews
- A sense of closure

A week without review is a week partly wasted.

Give yourself the gift of reflection, and let the weekend be a real break.

Hi,

This is an absolutely stellar framework. The difference between a trader who survives a few months and one who thrives for years usually comes down to exactly this: what they do after the market closes on Friday. Most people want to run from their screens—especially after a red week—but that is precisely when this routine is most critical.

To expand on your template, here are a few ways I’ve found we can take these 10 steps and turn them into a compounding system for long-term edge.

Elevating the "Rule-Following Percentage" (Step 3)

I love that you included this alongside standard metrics like R-multiple and win rate. Tracking "Execution Accuracy" completely shifts your psychological focus from making money to trading well. Over time, you realize that a losing trade executed perfectly according to your plan is actually a good trade, while a rogue, impulsive trade that happens to hit your take-profit is a terrible trade that reinforced a bad habit. Focusing heavily on this percentage kills the outcome-dependency that ruins so many accounts.

[PTScalper]

The Emotional Autopsy (Step 6)

When looking for patterns, combining time-of-day data with your emotional state is a game-changer. I highly recommend taking screenshots not just of the chart, but adding a text box directly on the image detailing how you felt in the moment. You might discover highly specific, destructive loops—for example, realizing that 80% of your forced, low-probability setups happen on Thursdays between 10:00 AM and 11:00 AM, right after you've had a minor loss. Once you see that pattern on paper, it loses its power over you.

The Power of the "Future Self" Note (Step 9)

This is arguably the most underrated step on the list. If you write that 1–2 sentence note every Friday, it becomes your mandatory pre-market reading for the following Monday morning. There is something profoundly grounding about Monday-Morning-You reading a warning or an encouragement from Friday-Afternoon-You. It bridges the gap over the weekend and instantly puts you back into a professional, focused mindset before you click a single button.

[PTScalper]

Systematizing the Review

To get the most out of your Step 2 (listing trades and screenshots), it helps to drop this data into a searchable format like a Notion board, Evernote, or a dedicated trading journal software. If you tag your trades by setup type (e.g., #TrendContinuation, #MeanReversion), by the end of the month, your weekly reviews seamlessly roll up into a massive database. You stop guessing what your best setup is because the math will simply tell you.

The Hard Disconnect (Step 10)

We operate in an environment of constant cognitive overload and decision fatigue. The market will gladly take 100% of your mental bandwidth if you let it. Actually walking away, closing the laptop, and refusing to look at weekend crypto charts or forex gaps is how you rebuild your psychological capital for Monday.

A week without a review isn’t just partly wasted—it’s an invitation to repeat the exact same mistakes next Tuesday. Great post, and a perfect reminder for everyone to treat this like a business rather than a casino.

[Fairman]

One more question I'd add: Did I actually trade my plan this week, or a version of it? Small changes creep in over a week, like taking entries a bit early. Spotting them on Friday keeps the drift from becoming a habit. A quick way to check is to pick three trades from the week and compare each screenshot with the written rules line by line. Was the trigger candle closed before entry? Was the stop where the plan said? Was the size right? If one detail differs on all three, that's a drift, not a one-off. Write it down and watch for it next week.