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Monthly check: planned trades vs taken trades

Every month I compare two numbers: how many valid setups appeared according to my rules, and how many I actually traded. It sounds basic, but it shows a lot.

To do this you need to log setups whether or not you take them, ideally with a screenshot. At the end of the month, you have a list of everything that met your criteria and can compare it with your trade log.

If you took far fewer trades than the setups that appeared, you may be hesitating, missing them because you weren't watching, or filtering more than your rules say. If you took more trades than valid setups, some of your trades didn't meet your rules.

The next step is to compare results. What would the missed setups have done if you'd taken them? If they would have been profitable on balance, your hesitation is costing you. If they would have lost, maybe your instinct to skip them is picking up on something your rules don't capture, which is worth investigating.

It's also a good reality check on the strategy. If you take all valid setups and the results over time look different from your backtest, that's information too.

It takes discipline to log the skipped setups, but it's one of the most useful things I've added to my review.

Does anyone else track this?

A practical challenge is that you can't watch every setup during a session, especially if you trade several pairs. One way to handle that is to do a quick end-of-session scan of the charts for setups you might have missed, using the same rules. It's not perfect, since hindsight can creep in, but taking a screenshot at the setup's trigger point and judging it only on what was visible then helps. Marking which ones you saw live and which you found later is useful too. Be strict that the found later ones don't get counted as setups you'd have taken live, since hindsight makes everything look clearer.

I'd also keep in mind that some setups get skipped for valid reasons not written in the rules, like an upcoming news release or a spread that's wider than usual. If those reasons come up repeatedly, add them to the rules so the comparison is fair. Otherwise the gap between planned and taken trades looks like hesitation when it's actually good judgement that just hasn't been written down yet. Writing it down also makes it easier to test whether those reasons actually help. Over time those notes often turn into the most useful rules in the whole plan.