Review

The review after a session is where a plan gets tested against reality, and skipping it because the day already felt good or bad throws away the one part of the process built specifically to be more objective than that feeling. Judge the trade against the plan, not the outcome A losing trade taken to plan, correct setup, right size, stop where it belonged, is a process success even though the outcome was a loss, because no edge wins every time. A winning trade taken outside the rules is a process failure that happened to pay off, and treating it as a good decision because it worked out teaches the wrong lesson for next time. The review’s job is separating those two, which the P&L on its own can’t do. ...

A trade journal is where every other part of this course gets checked against what happened. A plan, an entry, a managed position, a review, none of it compounds into real improvement without a record specific enough to look back on. What to log, beyond just win or lose A useful entry covers the setup type, the planned entry, stop, and target against what was filled, the size taken, and the reason for the entry written in the trader’s own words at the time, not reconstructed afterward to sound more logical than it was. Whether that reason held up, checked honestly once the trade is closed, is the part most journals skip and the part that teaches something. ...