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After failing an evaluation, what I do before buying another attempt

failing an evaluation stings, and the first instinct is to buy another one right away to get the money back. I've done that and it went badly. Now I have a routine before I try again.

First, I take a few days off from it. I don't look at the charts for the evaluation, and I don't plan the next one. The aim is to get out of the emotional state, since decisions made while annoyed are worse than ones made calmly.

Then I go through the trades one by one. I split them into valid setups that lost, trades that broke my rules, and whether the breach came from a rule I missed. In my case it was mostly rule breaks late in the day, not the setups. That tells me what to fix, and it's often behaviour, not strategy.

After that I write what I'll do differently, in specific terms, like a lower risk per trade, a hard stop after two losses, or no trading after a certain hour. I only buy the next attempt once I've done this, and I treat it as a new start, not a rescue.

The few days off is the step most people skip. I have bought another evaluation the same evening and traded it angry the next morning, and it went exactly as you would expect. Now I wait at least a week. In that time I go through the trades, write a short list of what to change, and only then decide whether to try again. Sometimes the answer is to trade my own small account for a while first, which is fine.

Splitting the trades into valid losses and rule breaks is a good way to see if the problem is the strategy or the behaviour. In my case it was the behaviour almost every time. When I see that, I do not change the strategy for the next attempt, I add a specific safeguard for the behaviour, like a hard stop time or a maximum number of trades after a loss. Changing the strategy after a behaviour failure is a common mistake.