Winning trades are easy to like.
Losing trades are more useful than we sometimes want them to be.
After a winner, the natural reaction is satisfaction. The trade worked. The analysis appears to have been correct. There is little emotional incentive to investigate further.
After a loser, the questions arrive immediately.
What went wrong?
Did I enter too early?
Did I miss something?
Was the setup bad?
Should I have stayed out?
Those questions can be valuable, but only if we ask the same questions about winners.
A profitable trade is not automatically evidence of good trading.
Perhaps the setup was excellent and the plan was followed perfectly.
But perhaps the entry was impulsive, the risk was excessive and the market simply happened to move in your favour.
If you record only the profit, those two trades look identical.
They are not.
The purpose of reviewing trades is therefore not simply to catalogue wins and losses. It is to build evidence about your own decision-making.
Over time, patterns begin to appear.
Perhaps your best trades occur when you wait for a pullback rather than chasing a move.
Perhaps losses cluster around major economic releases.
Perhaps trades taken late in a session consistently perform poorly.
Perhaps a setup you assumed was weak turns out to be one of your most reliable.
Memory is bad at discovering these things because memory is selective.
We remember the painful loss.
We remember the enormous winner.
We forget the twenty ordinary trades between them.
A journal turns experience into evidence.
That does not mean analysing every trade until you can invent an explanation for every movement. Markets contain randomness, and sometimes a perfectly reasonable trade simply loses.
The objective is not to explain everything.
It is to learn what can genuinely improve the next decision.
A useful review asks more than:
Did I win?
It asks:
Why did I take the trade?
Did it match my plan?
What happened after entry?
Did I manage it as intended?
Would I take the same trade again?
That final question is particularly useful.
If the answer is yes, a losing trade may have been a perfectly good trade.
If the answer is no, a winning trade may have taught you something even more important.
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