How to Review a Month of Market Observations

Start a monthly review with the complete set of events observed under consistent rules. Include notifications you reviewed, missed and chose not to trade. Attractive charts alone do not show the attention required or where the process failed.

If your records are incomplete, state the gaps. Do not reconstruct missing decisions as though they were made live. You can review an old chart separately, but that is a retrospective exercise with different limitations.

Each record needs time, pair, exchange, screener condition and review outcome. For a real trade, add actual fills, size and all costs. For an untraded event, do not assign profit using an ideal entry and exit.

An observation journal and a trade journal answer different questions. The first evaluates workflow. The second supports calculation of actual trading results when operations are fully recorded.

Hypothetical example: one workflow produced 120 notifications in a month. You reviewed 90 and left 30 unreviewed. Of the reviewed events, 60 did not fit your criterion and 30 deserved further observation. These describe the process; they are not strategy profitability statistics.

Reviewed share is 90 / 120 = 75%. Among reviewed events, the share worth further observation is 30 / 90 ≈ 33.3%. Dividing by 120 gives 25%, but answers a different question: the share of all notifications. The unreviewed 30 cannot confidently be labeled poor events.

Consider time. At an average of two minutes per review, 90 events would take roughly three hours. That estimate assumes similar durations; use recorded actual time if available. It allows comparison by workload rather than message count alone.

A quiet market month and a month of sharp moves are not directly comparable without context. Mark setting changes, gaps in observation and market conditions. Fewer messages after raising a threshold do not by themselves prove better quality.

Turn the monthly review into a screener adjustment

Suppose your journal shows that price moves are easier for you to review than OI changes. Keep the price screener as your main tool next month and adjust just one monitoring parameter.

• Record the old and new threshold or period. Keep the other conditions unchanged for comparison.
• Manually maintain the same journal: time, pair, exchange, condition, review outcome and missed events.
• If you develop a separate question about trading activity, add the turnover screener and track its events separately.

JustScreener continues monitoring your chosen conditions; the journal helps assess whether those events are useful to you. This review gives you a reason to choose a toolset instead of enabling everything at once.

Create an account and start with one routine. If you already use the service, choose one adjustment for next month and compare plans with the capabilities you actually need.

Next month’s plan:

• One scenario and a consistent event-review method.
• Records of reviewed and unreviewed notifications.
• Time spent and reasons for skipping.
• A separate journal for actual trades, if any.
• Consecutive data rather than selected best days.

Return to the notification routine. The failed-breakout review helps examine execution problems. The academy explains parameters.