Post-Trade Review

A post-trade review is the structured look back at a closed position: what the setup was, whether the entry and exit followed the plan, how the size was chosen, and what the market did afterwards. The point of a trade review is to separate the quality of the decision from the outcome, because a rule-following trade can lose and a rule-breaking trade can win. Reviews are normally done from journal entries and screenshots captured at the time, since memory reshapes itself once the result is known. Many traders run a short review per trade plus a weekly or monthly pass over the whole sample, where patterns — a consistently poor session, a recurring instrument, a repeated rule breach — become visible.