Going back over the first trade
Four questions that turn a trade into experience.
Learn to review your own trade by structure, whatever the result.
Which questions belong to a trade review?
A review is not “checking whether it worked”. It is an answer to four questions, none of which is about profit.
- 01What was the context of the market: trend, correction or range?
- 02What were you working from: which zone, which structure?
- 03What confirmed the idea at the moment of entry?
- 04What would have refuted it, and did that boundary come into play?
If a trade is in profit but there are no answers, that is not a success but an advance. The market takes it back as soon as a run arrives.
If a trade is at a loss but all four answers are there, that is work done properly with a negative result. The market is probabilistic, and most of your trades should look exactly like that.
- A plus with no answers
- — dangerous — random behaviour is being reinforced
- A minus with answers
- — normal — this is the cost of testing a hypothesis
- A minus with no answers
- — expensive — the mistake cannot be corrected
- A plus with answers
- — a working trade
After 20–30 reviews you will see your own patterns: the situations where the answers come easily, and the ones where they have to be invented. The second group is the one to skip.
Key takeaways
- A review is four questions, and none of them is about profit.
- A plus with no answers reinforces random behaviour.
- A minus with full answers is an ordinary working trade.
What people do
Reviewing only the losing trades. The winning ones with no reasoning are more dangerous: those are what form the false habits.
What works
Review the first trade of every day whatever the result. It sets the standard for all the ones after it.
A practical example
A journal template: “Context: upward trend on M5. Working from: the 1.0842 zone, third test. Confirmation: a long lower wick, the correction faded. Invalidation: a close below 1.0835 — did not come into play. Result: a plus.”
An entry like that takes 30 seconds and gives more than an hour of watching other people's reviews.
Lesson 15 of 15 in “YOUR FIRST TRADE”