Free trader tool
Trade Review Checker
Not every trade needs a deep review — but every trade needs a quick check. Tick the boxes for one trade and get an instant verdict on whether it broke your plan, your timing, or your risk rules.
Why it matters
The fast check most traders skip
A full trade review takes real time, so it is the first thing that gets dropped on a busy or a bad day — exactly the days the review matters most. The result is that rule breaks go unrecorded until they have already become a habit.
You do not always need the deep review. You need a thirty-second check that answers one question per trade: did this trade respect the rules I set, and if not, which category did it break? Plan, timing, and risk fail in different ways and route to different fixes.
This checker groups the checks into those three categories and returns a verdict for each. It is a triage tool: a clean trade passes in seconds, and a broken one tells you immediately where to look.
How it works
Check every box that is true for the trade. Each box is a rule you should have followed. The checker reads each category — plan, timing, risk — and reports it as clean if every box in it is ticked, or broken if any box is missed. The overall verdict is clean only when all three are.
- 1
Leave a box unchecked if you broke the rule
A ticked box means you followed that rule. Honesty is the whole mechanism — an unchecked box is the checker doing its job.
- 2
Read the per-category verdict
A trade can pass plan and timing but fail risk. The category that breaks tells you which discipline to work on, not just that "something went wrong".
- 3
Log the broken category
Over a week, the category that breaks most often is your primary leak. Counting them is how a vague sense of indiscipline becomes a specific, fixable target.
The calculator
A short checklist grouped into Plan, Timing, and Risk — tick each rule the trade actually followed.
Your result
A clean-or-broke verdict for each category and overall, naming exactly which rules the trade missed.
Tick each rule the trade followed to get your verdict.
Worked examples
Clean plan, broken risk
Good setup, entered at the trigger — but you sized up after a loss and slid the stop. Plan: clean. Timing: clean. Risk: broken on two boxes. The verdict points straight at risk management, not setup selection, which is where your work for the week now lives.
The FOMO entry
A valid setup you saw late, so you chased it after it had already moved. Plan: clean. Timing: broken. Risk: clean. The trade was not a bad idea — it was a bad entry, and the checker keeps you from blaming the playbook for an impatience problem.
The no-plan trade
You took a trade off a feeling with no setup behind it. Plan breaks immediately, and usually timing and risk follow. When all three break, the finding is not "tighten up" — it is "you traded without a plan", which is its own fix.
FAQ
How is this different from scoring a trade?
A score gives you a number on a gradient; this checker gives you a categorical pass/fail per rule category. Use the checker for fast triage on every trade, and a scorecard when you want to grade execution quality on a gradient. Many traders run the checker live and the score in their weekly review.
What if I do not have written rules to check against?
Then the checker just found your biggest leak. Plan, timing, and risk rules only become checkable once they are written down. Start with one rule in each category — a named setup, an entry trigger, and a position-size limit — and the checks become answerable overnight.
Is a broken trade always a mistake?
Not always — sometimes it is a deliberate experiment. The problem is never the occasional exploratory trade; it is failing to label it. Mark which category broke and why, and if the same break keeps appearing and keeps working, that is a candidate for becoming a written rule.
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 check automatic
In Mettle, every trade gets behavioral tags for exactly these plan, timing, and risk breaks — so the check happens as you journal, and the weekly review counts which category broke most. Free to start, no card.
More trader tools
Want the full method behind this tool? Read the guide.