The 2025 End-of-Year Trading Audit

Most traders will glance at their total P&L for the year, feel either happy or sad, and then move on. That is not a business review; that is just looking at a scoreboard. Here is the 3-step audit professional traders perform.

Step 1: The "Fat Tail" Elimination

In trading, your results are often skewed by extreme outliers. Open your ProfitPulse Dashboard and sort your trades by P&L (Losses first).

• Look at your top 5 biggest losses of 2025.
• Calculate what your total P&L would be if those 5 trades never happened.
• The Insight: Usually, eliminating just 5 bad decisions turns a losing year into a breakeven one, or a breakeven year into a profitable one.

Step 2: The Time-of-Day Heatmap

We often grind all day, giving back morning profits during the chop of lunch hour. Filter your 2025 data by "Hour of Day."

Step 3: Setup Performance Review

You likely traded 4 or 5 different setups this year. Which one actually paid the bills?

Tag your trades in ProfitPulse (e.g., Breakout, Reversal, TrendFollow). You will likely find the Pareto Principle applies: 80% of your profits came from 20% of your setups.

• Identify your #1 Setup (Highest Profit Factor).
• Identify your "Bleed" Setup (Profit Factor < 1.0).
• Action Plan: Write down your "Playbook 2026." It should only contain your winning setups. Ban the rest.