Most traders we meet already own a journal template. Few open it after a flat week. The review process we teach is deliberately short: thirty to forty minutes every Sunday evening, timed before the week’s first London session.
The scorecard has four columns only — setups taken, setups skipped with a valid reason, rules broken, and one sentence on market regime. Anything longer becomes optional homework, not the core habit.
Skipped setups deserve as much ink as filled ones. A clean pass on a marginal signal is evidence that the filter works. Recording skips also reduces the itch to force trades mid-week simply to have something to write about.
When life intervenes, we allow a compressed ten-minute version: list the broken rules, if any, and mark the regime in one word. Continuity beats completeness. A broken streak of missed Sundays is harder to restart than a truncated ritual that still happened.
Pair the written review with one chart replay of a single trade. Replay reveals timing mistakes that a static screenshot hides. Keep the replay under five minutes; the point is clarity, not cinema.