A Losing Week Reviewed Session by Session
A week where almost every trade lost is the most common trigger for changing a method, and it is almost always the wrong moment to change one. The review that follows a bad week is usually conducted at speed, in a poor mood, with the aim of finding something to fix. A slower version, taken morning by morning in order, tends to produce a different and less dramatic set of conclusions.
Start With the Conditions, Not the Results
The first pass through the week should record only what each morning looked like before any trade was taken. How tall was the range against a normal session for that instrument. Where inside the range did price spend its time. Was there a scheduled event near the open. Did the instrument gap.
Doing this before looking at outcomes matters, because knowing the result contaminates the description. A range that produced a loss gets remembered as obviously poor. Described in advance of the outcome, the same range is often unremarkable, and the honest note is that nothing about it warned you. That is a real finding, and it is unavailable to anyone who reviews results first.
Look for What the Bad Sessions Shared
With the conditions written down, the question becomes whether the losses have anything in common beyond being losses. Sometimes they do, and the answer is immediate. Every morning that week may have opened with a tall range, or every trade may have been taken in one direction while the underlying drift ran the other way, or the whole week may have been a compressed stretch where nothing sustained a move in either direction.
When a common factor appears, the useful response is a filter, not a redesign. The method did not stop working. It ran into a condition it handles poorly, which every method has, and the improvement available is recognising that condition in advance rather than changing the entry rule that had nothing to do with it.
Sometimes there is no common factor, and the sessions genuinely have nothing in common except the outcome. That is the more likely finding over a short stretch and the harder one to accept, because it offers nothing to do.
Then Check Whether the Rules Were Followed
The second pass asks a different question of each morning: was the trade the one the plan called for. Not whether it worked, whether it was the specified trade at the specified size with the specified stop.
This is where bad weeks reveal their real content. Very often the first session or two were traded exactly as written, and then something shifted. An entry taken slightly early because waiting had cost money the day before. Size increased on Wednesday to make back Tuesday. A stop moved once, just that once, because the trade was so obviously going to come back. The week is rarely a uniform application of a failing method. It is usually a good method for two sessions and something increasingly improvised after that.
The Sequence Is the Point
Reviewing in order is what exposes this. A list of five losing trades looks like five instances of the same thing. Read as a sequence, they frequently show a progression, where each session's deviation is a response to the previous session's loss and the deviations grow through the week.
That progression is the actual subject of the review. It says nothing about the entry rule and everything about what happens to decision making after a loss, which is information you can act on immediately and which will recur in every bad stretch for the rest of your trading life. A rule change addresses a problem that may not exist. A note about the third consecutive loss being the point where size starts creeping addresses one that certainly does.
What a Week Cannot Tell You
The temptation at the end of a bad week is to reach a verdict on the method. A week is far too short a sample to support one. Any approach with a realistic strike rate produces losing weeks regularly, and a run of them proves nothing except that variance exists.
The verdict a week can support is narrower and more useful: whether the plan was executed, what the conditions were, and whether those conditions are recognisable in advance. Answer those three and the review has earned its time. Reach for a conclusion about whether the whole approach is broken and the week has cost you twice, once in results and once in the perfectly good method you were about to abandon.