Calm and responsible trading
The 15-minute Sunday review
A short weekly routine that checks your process instead of your P&L. Five questions, one change, and you're done.
A risk desk doesn't wait for a disaster before it looks at the numbers. It reviews on a schedule, when nothing urgent is happening, so problems show up while they're still small.
You can run the same habit on your own account in fifteen minutes a week. Sunday works well because the market's closed and the week is still fresh.
Before you start
Have three things open: your trade log for the week, your Trading Mandate, and the if-then rules you wrote for your weak moments. If you haven't written those yet, start with Decide once.
Set a timer. The review should be short enough that you'll actually do it every week.
Five questions
- Did I stay inside my mandate every session? Count the sessions where you crossed a limit for loss, size, trade count or hours. Write the number down. It's the most important figure of your week.
- Which trades weren't in the plan? List them. Next to each one, write what happened just before it. A loss? A fast move? Boredom? You're looking for your trigger, not for a reason to feel bad.
- Did my if-then rules hold? For each rule, note whether it was tested and whether you followed it. A rule that keeps failing usually needs to be harder to break, not repeated more firmly.
- What did the unplanned trades cost? Add them up separately. The Cost of the Reflex calculator can do it for you, and your trades stay in your browser.
- What's the one change for next week? Choose a single adjustment. More than one at a time makes it hard to tell what worked.
What not to review
Skip second-guessing individual outcomes. A good trade can lose money, and a bad one can win. If a trade followed your plan, it passes the review whatever it made.
Don't use Sunday to raise your limits after a good week either. A useful rule: tightening a limit can start on Monday, while loosening one waits a full week and gets reviewed again first.
Keep a running scorecard
Write the same three figures each week: sessions inside your mandate, trades outside your plan, and the cost of those trades. After a couple of months, you'll have a record of your process that P&L alone can't give you. For a longer view, grade your next 100 trades.