Guide
How to review trades
A trade review answers three separate questions: was the setup valid, did you execute the plan, and what was going on in your head? Most traders blur them into one P&L-shaped feeling. Here is how to keep them apart.
By Daniel Kapadia, founder of Mettle · Published June 12, 2026
The problem
Outcome bias eats most trade reviews
The default review is a glance at the P&L column and a mood to match. Green day, good trading; red day, bad trading. That conflates the one thing you do not control — where price went — with the things you do: which trades you took, how you executed them, and the state you were in.
The cost is real. A trader who reviews by outcome reinforces chased entries that happened to work and punishes disciplined trades that happened to lose. Over months, that trains the exact opposite of edge: confidence in luck, doubt in process.
A review process that separates setup quality, execution, and psychology lets each one improve independently — and shows you which of the three is actually leaking money.
Step by step
- 1
Review at a fixed time, not in the heat
Right after the close, your judgment is still soaked in the day's adrenaline. Pick a fixed slot — thirty minutes after the session, or that evening — and review every session at that time. Consistency matters more than immediacy, but do not let it slide past the same day.
- 2
Re-see the trade on the chart
Pull up the chart with your entry and exit marked. Ask what the chart looked like at the moment of entry — not what it looks like now, with the future drawn in. Hindsight makes every loser look obvious; reviewing the decision means reconstructing what you could actually see.
- 3
Grade the setup first
Was this a setup from your playbook at all? Was the trigger actually present, or close-enough-squint-present? Grade the setup before you look at execution — a perfectly executed trade on an invalid setup is a different leak than a sloppy entry on a valid one.
- 4
Grade the execution against the plan
Entry: at the trigger, early, or chased? Stop: placed where the plan said, and held? Exit: per plan, panicked, or overstayed? Rule compliance: any rule bent? Score each honestly — these grades are self-reported, which is exactly why they work: only you know what the plan was.
- 5
Name the psychological state
One honest line: calm, rushed, revenge-flavored, overconfident after two wins, afraid to pull the trigger. You are not psychoanalyzing yourself — you are building a dataset that later shows which states precede which mistakes.
- 6
Score the trade independent of P&L
Give the trade a grade that would not change if the outcome flipped. An A-trade that lost is an A. A C-trade that won is a C. This single habit is the antidote to outcome bias, and it is the part most traders skip.
- 7
Extract one lesson per session
Not ten. Read the graded trades back and write a single sentence: the one thing to do differently next session. Ten lessons compete for attention and all lose; one lesson, repeated until it sticks, compounds.
Worked examples
The winner that grades a C
You chased a breakout two points above your trigger, the stop was a guess, and it ran anyway. P&L: solidly green. Review: setup valid, execution C-minus — chased entry, improvised stop. Logged honestly, this trade is a warning. Logged by outcome, it is a lesson in chasing.
The red day that grades an A
Three trades, all from the playbook, all entered at trigger with stops held. Two stopped out, one small winner. The day is red and the review is clean: nothing to fix, variance did its thing. Knowing the difference is what keeps a red day from turning into a red week.
A weekly lesson-trade walk-through
At week's end, pick the single most instructive trade — not the biggest win or loss, the most instructive. Walk it through all three lenses: setup, execution, psychology. One trade, fully understood, teaches more than twenty skimmed.
Common mistakes
Reviewing only losing trades
Losers get autopsies, winners get high-fives. But winners carry your most dangerous habits — the ones being rewarded. Review both or you are selecting for luck.
Grading the trade by where price went after
"It came back, I should have held" is not a review finding — it is hindsight rewriting the plan. The plan you had at entry is the only fair grading rubric.
Reviewing while tilted
A review written in the same emotional state that caused the mistake will defend the mistake. Fixed review time, some distance from the close, every session.
Producing no written output
A review that lives in your head evaporates by the next open. One written lesson per session is the minimum viable artifact.
Trying to review everything equally
Twenty trades reviewed at thirty seconds each is a chore, not a review. Grade them all briefly, then go deep on one or two. Depth on the instructive trades beats coverage of all of them.
Tools for the job
The minimum kit is your broker statement and a chart you can mark up. What a dedicated tool adds is structure: the same grading questions every session, charts with your fills already plotted, and a weekly loop that picks what deserves a deeper look.
Chart screenshots and a document
Workable and free. The friction — finding the chart, marking the fills, keeping grades comparable across weeks — is exactly what tends to end the habit by week three.
Mettle — review and scoring built in
Every journaled trade gets a page with entries and exits marked on the candle chart, structured execution grades (entry, stop, exit, rule compliance — self-reported and honest about it), and a session review flow that asks the same questions every time.
See how it works in MettleA weekly review ritual
Mettle's weekly review picks a lesson trade from your week and walks you through grading it, so the deep-dive happens even on the weeks you would have skipped it.
See how it works in MettleFAQ
How long should a trade review take?
Five to fifteen minutes for a session of a few trades: a quick grade on each, then depth on the one or two instructive ones. A weekly review deserves thirty to sixty minutes.
Should I review trades the same day or wait?
Same day, but not the same minute. You want enough distance that you are not defending the trade, and little enough that you still remember what you saw and felt at entry.
What if I do not have a written plan to grade against?
Then the review just found your biggest leak, and it is not your entries. Write the plan first — even three plays with defined triggers and stops — and the reviews become gradeable overnight. Our guide on tracking a trading plan covers how.
Is Mettle free to start?
Yes. You get full access free for 14 days with no card. We only ask for a card once you have reviewed three sessions — after the product has proven it earns a place in your routine.
Make the review automatic
Journal a session in Mettle and the review is waiting: your trades on the chart, the grading questions ready, and a weekly loop that picks your lesson trade for you.
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Picking a journal? Read our honest roundup of trading journal software.