How to Do a Weekly Trading Review: A 30-Minute Template
Logging trades is the easy part. The value of a trading journal comes from what you do with it afterwards — and most traders never build the habit of looking back. The entries pile up, nothing changes, and the journal quietly becomes a chore.
A weekly review fixes that. It doesn't need to take a whole Sunday. Thirty focused minutes, following the same structure every week, is enough to turn your journal into real improvement.
Before You Start
Pick a fixed time — Friday after the close or Sunday before the week starts both work well. Make sure every trade from the week is logged, including the ones you'd rather forget. A review built on a partial journal will tell you a flattering story that isn't true.
Part 1: The Numbers (5 minutes)
Write down, without commentary:
- Number of trades
- Win rate
- Net P&L, and total P&L in R
- Average winner and average loser in R
- Expectancy for the week
- Largest loss, and whether it was within your planned risk
Resist the urge to explain anything yet. The goal is to see the week as it actually was.
Part 2: Rule-Following (10 minutes)
This is the most important part of the review. Split your trades into two groups:
- Trades that followed your plan completely — every mandatory rule on your pre-trade checklist was met.
- Everything else.
Now compare the two groups. For most traders, this is the single most useful number in the whole review: the by-the-book trades are profitable, and the rest is where the week's damage came from.
For every trade in group 2, write one line: which rule did I break, and why? Look for repeats. "Entered before confirmation" three times in a week is a pattern worth fixing. Once is a mistake.
Also check for the usual suspects:
- Did you trade after hitting your daily loss limit?
- Did your trade count spike on any day? (See overtrading warning signs.)
- Did you take a trade right after a loss that you wouldn't normally take? (See revenge trading.)
- Did you chase any entries? (See FOMO trading.)
Part 3: Mindset (5 minutes)
Look back at the emotion and confidence you recorded on each trade, and any diary notes from the week.
- On which days did you trade best? What was different about how you felt, slept or prepared?
- Did low-confidence trades perform differently from high-confidence ones?
- Was there an outside factor — work stress, bad sleep, a big life event — that showed up in your trading?
This is where patterns hide that pure P&L analysis never finds. Plenty of traders discover their worst days line up with something that has nothing to do with the market.
Part 4: Best and Worst Trade (5 minutes)
Pick your best-executed trade — not necessarily the most profitable one — and your worst-executed trade. For each, answer:
- What did I do well / badly?
- Was the outcome deserved, or was it luck?
A well-executed trade that lost is a good trade. A badly executed trade that won is a dangerous one, because it teaches you the wrong lesson.
Part 5: One Goal for Next Week (5 minutes)
Finish with a single, specific, process-based goal. Not "make $2,000" — you don't control outcomes. Something like:
- "No trades in the first 15 minutes after the open."
- "Stop trading for the day after two consecutive losses."
- "Take profit at my planned target on every winner, no early exits."
One goal. Write it where you'll see it before every session, and start next week's review by checking whether you kept it.
The Template
Copy this into your journal each week:
Week of: __________
Numbers: Trades __ · Win rate __% · Net P&L __ · Total R __ · Avg win __R · Avg loss __R · Expectancy __R
By-the-book trades: __ trades, __R total Off-plan trades: __ trades, __R total Rules broken most often: __________
Mindset notes: __________
Best-executed trade: __________ Worst-executed trade: __________
Last week's goal — kept? Y / N Next week's goal: __________
Skipping the Busywork
The hardest part of a weekly review isn't the thinking — it's pulling the numbers together. That's the part Kaizen automates. Your trades feed an AI-written weekly self-review that covers your results and your behaviour, and the weekly reviews roll up into monthly, quarterly and yearly ones. Your setups show perfectly-matched trades against everything else, analytics break your results down by emotion, confidence and tags, and the diary sits alongside your trades — so the review becomes about deciding what to change, not building spreadsheets.
Thirty minutes a week, every week, beats a three-hour review you do once a quarter. Consistency is the whole trick.