20 Questions to Ask During a Journal Review

Most journal reviews are just re-reading. You scroll through last week's trades, nod at the winners, wince at the losers, and close the tab feeling vaguely productive. Nothing changes, because you never actually asked the record a question it could be forced to answer.

A review only pays off when it is interrogative. The journal is the data; the review is the analysis. And analysis needs prompts, the specific questions that pull a hard answer out of a soft memory. This post gives you 20 of them, grouped by what they interrogate, plus a rule for turning any review into a single thing to fix before the next session.

Why passive review teaches you nothing

Reading your trades back is not the same as reviewing them. The difference is that a review confronts you with a question you cannot dodge, and a re-read lets you narrate a comfortable story instead.

Two well-documented biases make the comfortable story the default. The first is hindsight bias, the "I knew it all along" effect first demonstrated by Baruch Fischhoff and Ruth Beyth in 1975: once you know the outcome, your memory quietly edits your earlier judgment to look more certain than it was (Fischhoff & Beyth, 1975). A trade that was a coin-flip guess at entry becomes, on Friday, "obviously a good setup." The second is the disposition effect. In a study of roughly 10,000 brokerage accounts, Terrance Odean found investors sold winners at a substantially higher rate than losers, realizing gains far more readily than the losses they held and hoped would recover (Odean, 1998). Left to memory, you will systematically misread which of your decisions were good.

Structured questions are the fix. Expertise research points the same way: Anders Ericsson's account of deliberate practice requires immediate, informative feedback and repeated revised attempts at a well-defined task, not just more reps (Ericsson & Harwell, 2019). A question bank is how you manufacture that feedback loop from your own trades.

How to use these questions

Do not answer all 20 every review. That turns into a chore you quit by week three. Pick the section that matches the review you are running: a fast daily pass leans on process and discipline questions; a deeper weekly or monthly review works through all six sections.

Answer each question in writing, in your journal, against actual trades. "Did I follow my rules?" answered in your head is a re-read. The same question answered as "I moved my stop on TSLA and NVDA after they went against me, which is 2 of 9 trades" is a review. Every question below is built to produce a countable or nameable answer, not a feeling.

And enforce the one-fix rule: a review is not finished until you have written down a single, specific change for next week. One fix you apply beats ten insights you forget.

Process and plan adherence

Start here, because process is the only thing you control. Outcome is downstream of it and partly noise.

1. What percentage of my trades matched a defined setup? Count the trades that fit a named, pre-planned setup versus the ones you took on impulse. This is your discipline ratio. Track it week over week.

2. For every trade, did I have a written thesis before I entered? A trade with no pre-entry plan cannot be reviewed honestly, because hindsight will invent the plan for you. If the thesis field is blank, that is the finding.

3. Which trades were off-plan, and what triggered each one? Name the trigger for every impulse trade: boredom, FOMO, revenge, a tip. The trigger is more useful than the trade.

4. Did my entries actually meet my entry criteria, or did I round up? Go criterion by criterion. "Close enough" entries are where a clean setup quietly degrades into a loose one.

5. Did I size each position the way my plan says to? Compare intended risk per trade against what you actually risked. Oversizing on "high-conviction" trades is one of the most common and most expensive leaks.

Risk and rule-breaks

This section exists to make rule-breaks countable. A broken rule you do not count is a broken rule you will repeat.

6. How many times did I move a stop-loss, and was each move planned or fear-driven? Widening a stop to avoid a loss is the single behavior most worth counting. Tag every instance.

7. Did any single trade exceed my maximum risk per trade? One outlier can undo a month. If the answer is yes even once, that is your one fix for the week.

8. What was my planned risk-to-reward on each trade, and did I hold to it? Cutting winners early to "lock it in" is the disposition effect in action, the same tendency to realize gains too readily that Odean documented (Odean, 1998).

9. Did I overtrade on any day? Count trades per session against your normal range. High activity is strongly associated with worse outcomes: across 66,465 households, Barber and Odean found the most active traders earned 11.4% annually while the market returned 17.9%, a gap they attributed to overconfidence-driven overtrading (Barber & Odean, 2000).

10. Did I break the same rule more than once this period? A one-off is variance. A repeat is a pattern, and a pattern is a mistake to tag. Our guide to a mistake-tagging framework turns these repeats into countable error categories you can rank and shrink.

Setup and edge quality

These questions read the record as data, sliced by setup, to find where your edge actually lives.

11. Which setup made the most money, and which lost the most? Group trades by named setup and compare. Feelings about a setup are unreliable; the grouped P&L is not.

12. Is my edge concentrated in one setup or spread thin? If 80% of your profit comes from one pattern, that is a signal to do more of it and prune the rest.

13. Did I take my A-plus setups when they appeared, or did I skip them? Missed A-plus trades are as much a leak as taking bad ones. Log the ones you did not take so hesitation becomes visible.

14. Under what market conditions did each setup work? A setup that prints in a trend and bleeds in chop is not one setup, it is two. Tag the regime so you can slice edge by condition.

Emotion and psychology

Emotion is data when you grade it. These questions turn a vague mood into a field you can correlate with outcomes. For a lightweight way to capture emotional state per trade, see how to track emotions in your trading journal.

15. What emotion showed up most before entering, and did it correlate with results? Fear, greed, boredom, and overconfidence each leave a footprint. Read the footprint back against P&L.

16. Did I trade differently after a loss than after a win? Post-loss behavior is where revenge trading lives. If your worst decisions cluster right after a red trade, that is your fix.

17. How many of this week's trades would I take again, exactly as I took them? If the honest answer is only a handful, most of your trades were impulsive or questionable, regardless of how they turned out.

18. Where did overconfidence cost me? Overconfidence is not a character flaw to feel bad about; it is a documented driver of overtrading and underperformance (Barber & Odean, 2000). Find the specific trades where certainty outran evidence.

Forward action

The last two questions convert the review into next week's plan. This is the deliberate-practice step: a well-defined change, applied on the next reps (Ericsson & Harwell, 2019).

19. What is the single most important thing to fix next week? One thing. Written down. Specific enough to check next review. "Trade better" fails this test; "no new entries in the last 15 minutes before the close" passes it.

20. What one thing did I do well that I want to reinforce? Reviews that only hunt mistakes burn you out and hide your edge. Name the good process so you protect it.

How this maps to your review cadence

Not every question fits every review. A rough split:

• Daily (5 minutes): questions 1, 3, 6, 15, 19. Process, rule-breaks, emotion, one fix.
• Weekly (20 to 30 minutes): add the risk, setup, and psychology sections. This is the interrogative core.
• Monthly: all 20, plus the setup-quality questions on a full month of data, where the sample is large enough for grouped stats to mean something.

The point is repetition with feedback, not volume. Five questions asked honestly every day compounds faster than 20 asked once and forgotten.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many questions should I actually answer per review?

Match the depth to the review. A daily pass of four or five questions keeps the habit alive; a weekly review of ten to fifteen does the real analytical work. Answering all 20 every day is the fastest way to quit. Consistency beats completeness.

Do I really have to write the answers down?

Yes. An answer you only think is subject to hindsight bias, which quietly rewrites your judgment to match the outcome (Fischhoff & Beyth, 1975). A written answer with a number or a name in it cannot be edited by memory later. The writing is the review.

What if the answers to my questions are all bad?

That is the review working. A run of bad answers points straight at your one fix, which is the deliverable. The goal of a review is not to feel good about the week; it is to leave with one specific, checkable change for the next one.

Are these questions only for the weekly review?

No. The section split above assigns questions to daily, weekly, and monthly reviews. The forward-action questions (19 and 20) belong in every review, because a review with no resulting change is just re-reading.

How do I answer setup-quality questions without doing manual math?

You need your trades grouped by setup, tag, and market condition, with P&L computed per group. In a spreadsheet that is a pile of pivot tables. A dedicated trading journal does the grouping for you. TradeReveal's analytics and Trade Explorer let you slice trades by setup, tag, and time and compute win rate, profit factor, and R-multiple per group on the free core, so question 11 becomes a filter instead of an afternoon.

Final Thoughts

A journal is a pile of records until you ask it something. These 20 questions are the difference between scrolling your trades and interrogating them. Pick the ones that fit the review you are running, answer them in writing against real trades, and refuse to close the review until you have named one fix for next week.

The compounding is quiet. One honest question, one written answer, one specific change, repeated. That loop is what turns a month of trades into a month of improvement, and it costs you nothing but the discipline to keep asking.

Start your free TradeReveal account today

Happy Trading,

The TradeReveal Team

Sources

• Odean, T. (1998). "Are Investors Reluctant to Realize Their Losses?" The Journal of Finance, 53(5). PDF
• Barber, B. M., & Odean, T. (2000). "Trading Is Hazardous to Your Wealth: The Common Stock Investment Performance of Individual Investors." The Journal of Finance, 55(2). PDF
• Ericsson, K. A., & Harwell, K. W. (2019). "Deliberate Practice and Proposed Limits on the Effects of Practice on the Acquisition of Expert Performance." Frontiers in Psychology, 10:2396. Article
• Fischhoff, B., & Beyth, R. (1975), on hindsight bias, summarized in Hindsight Bias, an overview, ScienceDirect.