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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?

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?

PTScalper wrote: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?

PTScalper wrote: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.

Interesting counterpoint to the journaling trend. The argument works for highly visual price-action setups, but there's one category we'd still keep in writing: execution data. Spread at entry, slippage and time of day don't feel important in the moment and are impossible to remember a week later.

A middle ground that costs almost no time is an automatic log from the platform: export the trade history weekly and add one column with a 1-5 setup grade. No essays, no mistake diary. After a few hundred trades you can still check whether your A grades really outperform the C grades, which is the one question a journal exists to answer.

The five slots all pick trades for being unusual, and that is the one gap I would plug. Best R, worst R and the two process mismatches are the tails of the week by design.

Say you take 60 tickets a week. Five reviews cover about 8 percent of them, and over a 13 week quarter that is 65 reviewed tickets, almost none of them ordinary.

The ordinary trades are where the slow leaks live: entries a pip late, exits cut at 0.6R out of habit, spread paid on setups that were only half there. None of them is bad enough to make the worst list.

A cheap fix is a sixth slot picked at random, say by rolling for a ticket number before opening the log. Because you did not choose it, it gives an honest picture of a normal day.

It also pairs well with the 1 to 5 grade column idea, since the random ticket shows whether the grades given in the moment match what the screenshot says later. Would a random pick fit inside the twenty minute timer, or would something else have to go?

The rule line on each ticket is where this habit can quietly grow back into the old essay. One new rule each Sunday sounds small, but over a quarter that is 13 rules piling up on top of the playbook.

Nobody follows 13 fresh rules at once. By week six the early ones are forgotten, and the review keeps producing instructions that nobody checks.

A cap fixes that. Keep at most three active rules, and before writing a fourth, retire one or merge it into the checklist for good.

The first two minutes of the next Sunday can then go on a yes or no for each active rule. Did I follow it this week, and did it come up at all?

Twenty minutes across five tickets is four minutes each, so taking two minutes off the top does squeeze things. Still, a rule that never gets checked is just a note, and that check is the part that turns a review into a change.

Has anyone found a good number for active rules, or does it depend on how often the setup appears? Three is a guess, and a trader with one setup might manage fewer.

Weekend news does not wait for the market to open. Political shocks, military events, and surprise announcements can arrive on a Saturday or Sunday, and the Sunday open reveals the market's reaction in one jump.

A scalper rarely holds trades over the weekend, but pending orders, forgotten positions, and automated systems sometimes do. Any of them can fill at the gap price, which may be far from the stop level.

Gap risk is not symmetrical. Some pairs, like the yen crosses or commodity currencies, tend to react more sharply to geopolitical news. Others stay relatively calm.

The practical rule is straightforward: flatten everything before the Friday close, cancel pending orders, and disable any automated systems that might trade at the Sunday open.

The cost of this is small. The cost of ignoring it is occasionally large.

Curious whether you have ever been caught by a weekend gap, or had a close call you can learn from?