Journal, review and what to measure

Before the session

Most of this is the preparation article, written down instead of thought:

The bias and its reason, in one sentence.
The kind of day you expect, and what would tell you it is not that.
The levels — the short list, marked before anything moves.
The maximum loss for today, and the maximum number of trades.
Your state, scored out of ten. Focus and calm, before you start.

That last one looks soft and is the most predictive line on the page. Scored honestly for a month, it explains more of your worst days than any chart will.

After the session

What kind of day it actually was, and whether it matched.
The trades, with a screenshot at entry and at exit, and the levels visible.
The best one — what went right, including the management.
The worst one or the error — what happened, why, and what would prevent it.
How you felt, during rather than after. «Anxious as price approached the stop» is data.
A score out of ten for the process.

The idea that makes it work

Score the process, not the money. A good trade is one that followed the plan — whether it won or lost.

Everything else in this article depends on accepting that sentence, and it is harder than it reads. A day where you followed the plan and lost is a good day by the only standard you control. A day where you abandoned it and won is the most expensive kind of win, because it pays you for the behaviour that will eventually cost the most.

Which is why the two scores — state before, process after — matter more than the profit and loss column. They are the two things that can actually be improved next week.

What to measure

Here this site departs from the playbook deliberately. Its review page sets targets for win rate and average reward, and those are exactly the figures this site does not publish — and, more to the point, they are results rather than behaviour. In a system built to score the process, they measure the wrong thing.

These are the alternatives, and every one of them is countable from your own notes:

Measure	What it tells you
Trades taken vs trades planned	Whether you are trading your plan or the screen.
Biggest loss vs your limit	Whether the stop is real. One breach is a rule that does not exist.
Losing trades before quality drops	The number the first article of this stage asked you to find. It is in here, and nowhere else.
Which window you traded	Whether your results cluster in one part of the day. Usually they do.
Expected day type vs actual	Whether your morning read is improving. This one takes months and is worth all of them.
Process score over time	The only line on the page that measures the thing you can control.

The cadence

Four rhythms, from the playbook, and the point is that they ask different questions:

Daily, twenty minutes — log, screenshot, name the day's error, choose one concrete improvement.
Weekly, longer, at the weekend — patterns rather than incidents. Same error three times is not three incidents.
Monthly — what to stop doing. Which approaches earned their place and which have been kept out of habit.
Quarterly — the whole system, including whether the instrument, the hours and the size still fit the life you actually have. That is the second stage of this path, revisited.

Do the weekly one when the market is closed. The playbook is specific about that, and the reason is the diagram from the previous article: you cannot review a decision honestly while you are still inside the feeling that produced it.

The improvement cycle

Diagram 1. The fifth box is the one people rush. Adjusting everything after a bad week feels decisive and destroys the only evidence you were collecting.

That is the path

Ten stages, and it ends here rather than with a strategy, which was the promise on the first page: how to read, not what to trade.

You know what you are holding and what it costs. You know when it trades and what a day is shaped like. You know how a price is made, who crossed the spread to make it, and what the instruments that measure that can and cannot tell you. You know where the levels are and why they matter — because instructions rest at obvious prices, not because the prices are magic.

And you know the honest limit that every stage ended on: all of it describes what has already happened. None of it predicts. What it does is let you form a specific expectation, write down what would prove it wrong, and then watch closely enough to find out — which is a smaller claim than most of this industry makes, and the only one that survives contact with a live market.

The rest is repetition, records, and the discipline to keep both. That part nobody can write for you.