Sharpen Your Edge for 2026 – Part 1: Have You Actually Reviewed 2025?

As we head into the final working week of 2025, I want to ask you a very simple question:

Have you actually reviewed your trading year properly?

Not thought about it in the shower.
Not replayed a couple of good trades or a painful drawdown.
I mean a deliberate, structured review of how you operated as a trader over the last twelve months.

Because most traders don’t do this.

They remember 2025.
They don’t review it.

They remember the highs.
They remember the lows.
They remember a few moments that stand out emotionally.

What they don’t do is step back and look at the year as a whole — how they prepared, how they executed, how they handled pressure, how disciplined they were when things didn’t go their way.

And that matters far more than most people realise.

Remembering Isn’t Reviewing

There’s a big difference between recalling events and reviewing performance.

Remembering is emotional.
Reviewing is analytical.

When traders skip a proper review, they carry assumptions forward:

• “I just need better entries.”
• “The market was difficult this year.”
• “If I can just stay a bit more disciplined…”

None of those statements are useful unless they’re grounded in evidence.

A proper review asks harder questions:

• How consistently did I follow my plan?
• Where did I break my own rules?
• What conditions suited me, and which didn’t?
• How did I respond after losses?
• Did I trade smaller, larger, or more emotionally as the year progressed?

If you can’t answer those questions clearly, you’re not reviewing — you’re guessing.

Why This Gets Skipped

I’ve worked with traders for long enough to know why this part gets avoided.

A proper review forces honesty.

It means admitting:

• where discipline slipped
• where preparation was rushed
• where emotions took control
• where effort didn’t match ambition

It’s much easier to say, “Next year will be different,” than to sit down and understand why this year unfolded the way it did.

But hope isn’t a strategy.

And drifting into a new year without understanding the last one is one of the fastest ways to repeat it.

The Cost of Carrying 2025 Into 2026 Unexamined

Here’s the uncomfortable truth.

If you don’t formally review 2025, you don’t start 2026 fresh.
You start it loaded.

Loaded with:

• unexamined habits
• unchallenged beliefs
• emotional baggage from wins and losses
• routines that may or may not be helping you

That’s why so many traders feel motivated in early January… and frustrated again by February.

They didn’t reset.
They just changed the calendar.

This Week Is the Moment

I’m writing it because after this week — the quiet gap between one year ending and another beginning — is one of the few moments traders get to pause without market noise screaming for attention.

If you’ve set aside time to review 2025 properly, you’re already ahead of most.

If you haven’t, this is the moment to do it.

In the next piece, I’ll look at what it actually costs traders when they skip this step — and why the absence of review quietly undermines progress year after year.

For now, just sit with the question:

Have you actually reviewed 2025 — or have you just remembered it?