THE WEEKLY REVIEW — AND THE MONTHLY BOOK

The week’s daily pages aggregated: the costliest recurring error found and priced, next week’s single goal set from it, and — monthly — the four weekly pages summed into the book calculation. The sample’s Week 2 review and its four-week book, computed in full. A small shop closes its books weekly and monthly, and nobody calls it pessimism — it is how the owner knows which shelf leaks. The daily till counts are real but anecdotal: a bad Tuesday might be weather, a thief, or the start of a pattern, and the day itself cannot say which. The week’s close can: it lines the days up, prices each leak separately, and sends the owner into next week fixing ONE thing — the shelf that actually leaks, not the one that had the noisiest day. The month’s close is where verdicts live: a shelf is reordered, moved, or dropped on the month’s summed evidence, never on Tuesday’s feelings. Your journal is the same business at the same cadence — daily pages are the till counts, the weekly review finds the leaking shelf, and the monthly book is the only meeting where setups get promoted or retired.

THE WEEKLY REVIEW · STAGE 9 · LESSON 4

THE TAKEAWAYS

• The weekly method, in order: (1) TALLY — trades taken, GOOD/BAD split, net R and dollars, each printed with its count and no expectancy claims (three trades do not have an expectancy; they have a sum). (2) PRICE THE ERRORS — the week’s error-tagged trades summed by pattern word: the most expensive error, and separately the most REPEATED one — they are not always the same line, and Lesson 6’s leak hunt needs both. (3) ONE GOAL — next week’s single process goal, written as a rule with a trigger, aimed at the error the evidence indicts. (4) THE PLAYBOOK DELTA — any page whose verdict, guard or examples the week’s evidence touched gets its dated line. Four moves, one page, about thirty minutes — SMB’s weekly shape, run on this course’s artefacts.
• Why ONE goal: a goal is a daily-review instrument — it must fit in the headline box of five daily pages and be gradable at a glance at 4pm. Five goals fit nowhere and grade nothing; by Wednesday the trader is failing four of them and the ritual’s credibility — its only real asset — is spent. The sample’s Week 2 produces exactly one: ‘entries only after a held close; the plan card is read aloud before the ticket.’ Every other finding (the tuition was ordinary; the exits behaved) is recorded as context, not converted into homework. Discipline is subtraction.
• The monthly book calculation, done the course’s way: sum the four weekly pages — R, dollars, percent of account — and set beside the sum the month’s error account (errors priced by kind, Lesson 5) and the process account (GOOD trades’ net). The sample’s month reads: net −2.85R / −$585 / −2.3% of the $25,000 paper account; process account +0.43R; error account −3.28R. One sentence carries the month: ‘A +0.43R process carrying −3.28R of errors.’ That sentence — not the −$585 — is what the next month’s weekly goals are built from, because it names the part that is fixable.
• What the monthly meeting may and may not do: it revisits PlayBook verdicts (Lesson 6 runs the full board), reads the month’s feelings file in aggregate (Lesson 5’s psychology evidence), and re-checks the brakes against the month’s worst week. It may NOT retire or promote a setup on one month’s sums alone unless the 30-trade cycle has also closed (counts govern), and it never sets strategy by the money line: a month whose errors shrank while its dollars fell is a GOOD month in this book, and a month of lucky errors is a bad one wearing green. The book grades the business; the market grades itself.

WORKED EXAMPLE — STEP BY STEP

1. Tally Week 2 from its daily pages: three trades — #4 (shelf credit, clean, −0.50R tuition), #5 (stays-up debit, early entry, −0.70R), #6 (shelf credit, revenge entry, −1.00R). Week sum −2.20R, −$693. Grades: one GOOD, two BAD. The tally is printed with its count and no adjective: three trades is a sum, not a verdict — the review’s verdicts will be about errors, which are countable at any sample size, not about edges, which are not.
2. Price the week’s errors by kind and pattern: plan errors −1.00R (#6 — the revenge entry, its door ignored as a consequence); execution errors −0.70R (#5 — early entry); tuition −0.50R (#4). The decomposition is the finding: cleaned of its errors, Week 2 is a −0.50R week — an ordinary tuition week, inside every brake, the kind of week the method EXPECTS to have. The disaster was two entry decisions. The weekly sentence goes in the book verbatim: ‘Week 2 did not have an exit problem. It had a door-into-the-market problem.’
3. Set next week’s one goal from the indictment: both of the week’s errors were ENTRIES — one early, one vengeful — so the goal is an entry rule with a trigger: ‘entries only after a held close; the plan card is read aloud before the ticket; and a loss that wants company ends the day (Stage 8’s circuit-breaker, restated as a goal).’ Then grade Week 3 against it, from Week 3’s own page: +0.03R, three trades, entries all on plan (the goal held) — and the week’s only error is an EXIT bend (#9’s door, +0.02R). The review records the migration without drama: the leak moved; Lesson 6’s longer window will decide what that means. Process progress is measured in the error tally, and Week 3’s tally (−… one bent door, paid) is visibly thinner than Week 2’s — on a week whose money was a coin flip.
4. Close the month: the book calculation. Weeks +0.79, −2.20, +0.03, −1.47 sum to −2.85R; dollars +196, −693, +87, −175 sum to −$585; −$585 on the $25,000 paper account is −2.3%. Beside the sums, the two accounts: process +0.43R (seven GOOD trades), errors −3.28R (five BAD). The monthly meeting notes the worst week against the brakes (Week 2’s −$693 never touched the $1,000 weekly brake — the sizing system held even while the entries didn’t) and defers all setup verdicts to Lesson 6’s board, where the 30-trade arithmetic lives.
5. File the PlayBook delta the month produced: Lesson 2’s stays-up page gains a dated line — ‘Month 1: guard installed (no ticket before a held close). Error line −2.30R, all entries. Re-judge at 30.’ — and the feelings file is read in aggregate (four lines worth quoting, Lesson 5 will use one). The monthly book is now a page that next month’s review opens first: the craft’s memory, doing for months what the database does for trades.

ONE GOAL, NOT FIVE — AND WHY VERDICTS ARE MONTHLY

The weekly shape — aggregate the journal, find the one recurring error costing the most, make next week’s single goal about that error — is SMB Capital’s published weekly routine, adapted to this course’s tags and R accounting; the monthly book calculation is this course’s extension of it, built from Stage 4’s and Stage 8’s brakes and accounts. The cadence is a sample-size rule wearing a calendar: daily pages can grade goals (process is visible immediately), weekly pages can price errors (a handful of trades suffices to name a repeated behaviour), but verdicts about SETUPS need the 30-trade cycle (Lesson 6) and therefore live at the monthly meeting at the earliest. Each ritual is allowed exactly the conclusions its evidence can carry — the daily no verdicts, the weekly no promotions, the monthly no strategy-by-money. That rationing is not modesty; it is what keeps a review system believable to the one person who must obey it.

COMMON BEGINNER MISTAKES

• Setting five weekly goals. They cannot fit a daily page’s headline box, they grade as permanent failure by Wednesday, and the ritual gets fired by its only employee.
• Ending a red week by shopping for a new setup. The journal’s evidence belongs to the recurring error it indicted; new setups enter as paper candidates through the PlayBook, one at a time.
• Reading a verdict off a single week. The sample’s weeks run +0.79 / −2.20 / +0.03 / −1.47R — four different ‘traders’. Weeks price errors; months revisit verdicts; setups are judged at 30 trades.
• Summing the month from the broker’s statement instead of from the weekly pages. The statement has the money and none of the grades — a book summed from it can describe a month but can’t improve one.

CHECK YOURSELF

DO IT — RUN YOUR FIRST WEEKLY REVIEW + MONTHLY SUM

On the Weekly Review sheet (Downloads), review your most recent full week of paper trading: tally it (trades, GOOD/BAD, net R — with the count printed and no expectancy language); price its errors by kind and pattern word; write the week’s one sentence (‘Week N did not have an ___ problem; it had a ___ problem’); set next week’s ONE goal as a rule with a trigger. If you hold four reviewed weeks, add the monthly book: the four sums, the percent of your paper account, the process account and the error account side by side, and the month’s one sentence. File any PlayBook delta as a dated line on the page it touches. Paper only.