The weekly trading review template that actually works

Most weekly trading reviews are journaling theater. You open the journal Sunday evening, scroll through the green days, nod approvingly, glance past the red days, write "need to be more disciplined," close the tab, and call it review. Nothing changes the following week. The pattern repeats.

A weekly review that works has to force you to look at the things your brain wants to skip. Here's the 5-question structure I use and the literal template you can copy-paste into any journal.

Why 5 questions and not 15

The longer the review template, the less likely you are to do it weekly. After three weeks of 45-minute reviews you'll skip a week. After two skipped weeks you've quit. The honest goal is a review you do EVERY week for a year, not a perfect review you do four times in February.

Five questions forces concentration. Force a yes/no, force a specific trade, force a number — not vague reflection. Every question below is designed to surface something your brain didn't want to see.

Question 1: Which 2-3 trades carried the week?

Not your win rate. Not your total P&L. The specific 2-3 trades that produced the bulk of your positive P&L. Concentration check: in any given week, your top 3 trades typically account for 60-80% of your gains. If they don't — if your wins are evenly spread — you're probably scalping a small edge across many trades, which is a fragile place to be.

Looking at the top 3 forces you to ask: WHY those trades worked. What setup. What time of day. What size. The R-multiple. (Don't know what R-multiple means? See the R-multiple primer.)

Question 2: Which 2-3 trades killed the week?

Same question, inverted. The 2-3 trades that bled the most. Same concentration pattern in reverse: typically 2-3 trades account for the majority of weekly drawdown. Identifying them is uncomfortable, which is why most weekly reviews skip this step entirely.

Ask: were they your setup, or were they exceptions? Did you size up? Did you hold past your stop? Was it a tilt sequence after a winner or after a loser? Naming the 2-3 worst trades by name (not aggregate) makes the pattern visible.

Question 3: Did I follow my rules? Where didn't I?

If your trading plan has, say, six rules (size, stop, max daily loss, max trades, setup list, news avoidance), the question is: percentage of trades where I followed all six. The answer should be above 80%. If it's below 60%, you don't have a rule problem — you have an EXECUTION problem, and that needs different treatment than tweaking the rules.

Name the specific rule breaks. "I held past my stop on Tuesday's MSFT trade." Not "I need more discipline." Specific behavior identification, not vague exhortation.

Question 4: What setup made me the most money?

Group your week's P&L by setup tag. Which one paid the most? Which one paid the least? If you have a clear winner, the question becomes: am I taking enough of that setup, or am I diluting my edge by taking weaker setups too?

Most traders discover after 3-6 weeks of this question that 70-80% of their P&L comes from one or two setups. The rest is noise (or losses). The actionable insight: take more of the edge-positive setup, fewer of the edge-neutral ones.

Question 5: What's the ONE thing I'm changing next week?

Not a list of seven things. ONE thing. The brain can change one behavior at a time; trying to change seven at once changes zero. If question 3 found that you held past your stop three times last week, the ONE thing might be: "every trade gets a hard stop at entry, no exceptions."

Write it down. Make it specific. Make it measurable. The next week's review will check whether you actually changed it.

The literal template

Copy-paste this into your journal:

“Week of [date]. Net P&L: $___. Win rate: __%. ---- 1. Top 3 trades by P&L: a) [symbol] [setup] [R] [why] b) [...] c) [...] ---- 2. Bottom 3 trades by P&L: a) [symbol] [setup] [R] [what went wrong] b) [...] c) [...] ---- 3. Rule adherence: __% of trades followed all rules. Specific breaks: [...] ---- 4. Best setup this week: [tag] ($___ across __ trades). Worst setup: [tag] ($___ across __ trades). ---- 5. ONE thing I'm changing next week: [specific behavior change].”

How long this should take

20 minutes. Not 2 hours — that's procrastination disguised as thoroughness. Not 5 minutes — that's theater. 20 minutes is enough to look at the top 3 and bottom 3 trades, check the rule adherence count, scan the setup breakdown, and write ONE behavior change.

Sunday evening, 6-8 PM, before the week starts is the optimal window. The trading week is closed, you're not in the middle of a position, and the change you commit to will be operative starting Monday.

Why TFQ's /journal page builds this in

TradeFlow Quantum's weekly review surface auto-populates these 5 questions from your trade data. Top 3 and bottom 3 trades by P&L are pre-computed. Rule adherence % comes from your rule-tag data. Setup breakdown is the existing analytics. Question 5 — the ONE thing — is the one field you fill in yourself.

It's not a forced structure; you can skip questions or write more. But the scaffold is there so the review takes 20 minutes instead of 2 hours, and so the questions you'd skip get put in front of you. (Curious how this stacks against the heavyweight competitors? See Tradezella vs Edgewonk.)

Doing it without TFQ

If you use a different journal or a spreadsheet, the template above works the same. Open Excel, fill in the 5 sections, save with the date in the filename. Three months in, you'll have 12 weekly reviews you can read sequentially to see what's changed and what hasn't. That's the most undervalued artifact in any trader's process.

The 7-day trial gives you the auto-populated weekly review pre-filled from your trade data. Bring your own trades via CSV import or broker OAuth.