Monthly Trading Review - Template & Checklist

In short. A monthly trading review is a fixed checklist of numbers to calculate from the past month's logged trades: win rate, profit factor, average R-multiple, drawdown against the limit, performance broken down by setup tag, and plan-followed rate. Run it the same way every month and it turns a stack of closed trades into one or two specific rules for the month ahead instead of a vague impression of how things went.

Most traders who keep a journal know they should look back at it once a month. Far fewer have a fixed list of what to actually calculate when they sit down to do it, so the review turns into scrolling through recent trades and reacting to whichever ones are still fresh in memory, usually the last big win or the last frustrating loss. A checklist fixes that by making the review the same shape every time, regardless of how the month felt while it was happening.

What this checklist is not

Building the habit of reviewing on a fixed weekly and monthly schedule, and logging trades in a way that survives a losing week, is its own topic covered in how to keep a trading journal. This article assumes that habit is already in place and focuses narrowly on what to calculate once the review actually starts: the specific numbers to pull, in a specific order, so two different months produce comparable results instead of two differently shaped write-ups.

The monthly review checklist, step by step

1. Confirm every closed trade is logged. Before calculating anything, check the count of logged trades against account history. A review built on a partial month of entries produces numbers that look precise but are not.
2. Calculate win rate for the month. Winning trades divided by total closed trades. On its own this number is close to meaningless, which is exactly why it is step one and not the only step: win rate without R-multiple can make a losing month look fine.
3. Calculate profit factor. Gross profit divided by gross loss for the month. A profit factor below 1 means the month lost money regardless of how the win rate looked.
4. Calculate average R-multiple across all trades. Not just the winners. A month can have a healthy win rate and still carry a negative average R if losers are running larger than winners relative to planned risk.
5. Check drawdown against the limit, not just against the starting balance. For prop-funded accounts this means checking the actual daily and maximum drawdown figures against the rules for that specific account, not an approximate mental estimate.
6. Break results down by setup or strategy tag. The month-level averages in steps 2 to 4 hide which specific setups are doing the work and which are quietly dragging the average down. A tag with a strong overall win rate can still be carried entirely by one or two outlier trades.
7. Break results down by day of week and session. The same trade taken during a normal session and during a low-liquidity session is not the same trade in practice, even with an identical setup tag.
8. Calculate the plan-followed rate. The percentage of trades where the actual entry, size, and exit matched the plan set before entry. A month with a good result but a low plan-followed rate is a month that got lucky, not a month that worked.
9. Compare this month against a running baseline, not against last month in isolation. A single month is a small sample. Comparing against a three- or six-month rolling average makes a one-off cold or hot streak easier to tell apart from an actual shift in performance.

Important. None of these calculations require anything beyond the fields already logged for each trade: outcome, size, planned risk, setup tag, and a plan-followed flag. If a number on this list cannot be calculated from the existing journal, the gap is in what gets logged during the month, not in the review process itself.

Monthly review checklist at a glance

How many trades before the numbers mean anything

A single setup tag with five trades this month is not enough to draw a conclusion from, even if all five were losses. Small samples are dominated by variance, and a string of losing trades on a genuinely sound setup happens regularly on pure chance. The Van Tharp Institute's material on expectancy and sample size treats this as a core statistical point for traders, not a minor caveat: a setup's real win rate and average R only start to stabilize once enough trades have accumulated under it, and reading a five- or ten-trade sample the same way as a hundred-trade sample is a common source of traders abandoning working setups too early or trusting broken ones too long (Van Tharp Institute, Tharp Think Trading Concepts). A monthly review is one data point in that accumulation, not a verdict on its own.

Turning findings into next month's rules

A review that ends with an observation and nothing else tends to produce the same observation again next month. The step that changes anything is converting each flagged item from the checklist above into one specific, checkable rule before the next month starts: not "watch position sizing," but "no size above 1 percent of the account after two consecutive losses in the same session." A checklist with nine steps rarely needs nine new rules attached to it. One or two, chosen from whichever step showed the clearest problem this month, is usually enough to act on before the next review.

This article is for educational purposes only and is not financial or investment advice. Trading with leverage carries a high risk of loss, and past performance does not guarantee future results.

Run this checklist automatically instead of recalculating it by hand every month with the BitStat trading journal, which tracks win rate, profit factor, R-multiple, and drawdown against your account rules as trades close.