Most traders spend their energy before and during the open. Very few spend ten honest minutes after it.

That’s a missed opportunity. The pre-market plan tells you what you intended to do. The post-session review tells you what you actually did, and the gap between those two is where most of the learning lives.

This post walks through a simple review routine for NQ and MNQ traders. It’s education only, not a signal service, and not a promise of results.

Risk disclaimer: This article is for educational purposes only. Trading futures involves substantial risk of loss. Leverage can magnify losses. Nothing here is personalized trading advice or a guarantee of performance. Always confirm your own plan, your broker’s margin requirements, and any account rules before you trade.

Why review at all?

NQ moves fast, and memory is unreliable when things move fast. By lunchtime, a rushed entry can feel like a reasonable one, and a trade you cut early can feel like it was always going to fail.

A short written review does three things:

  • It captures what happened while it’s still fresh.
  • It separates good decisions from good outcomes, which aren’t the same thing.
  • It turns a vague feeling (“I traded badly”) into something specific you can fix.

Step 1: Log every trade, including the ones you skipped

For each trade, write down a few plain facts:

  • Time of entry and exit.
  • Direction and size (how many NQ or MNQ contracts).
  • Why you took it. Which level or scenario from your plan did it come from?
  • Where your stop was and whether you kept it there.
  • Result in points and dollars.

Then add the trades you almost took. A setup you passed on can teach as much as one you took, especially if you passed on it for a good reason.

Keep it short. A few lines per trade is enough.

Step 2: Grade the process, not the P&L

This is the most useful habit in the whole routine.

A trade that followed your plan and lost is still a well-executed trade. A trade that broke your rules and happened to win is still a mistake, and repeated often enough, it usually catches up with you.

For each trade, ask a few yes-or-no questions:

  1. Was it in my plan before the open?
  2. Did I size it inside my risk per trade?
  3. Did I leave my stop where I planned it?
  4. Did I exit for a reason, or because I got nervous or greedy?

Some traders give each trade a simple A, B, or C grade based on those answers. Over a few weeks, the grades often tell a clearer story than the account balance.

Step 3: Look for the repeat mistake

After a handful of sessions, patterns start to show. Common ones on NQ include:

  • Chasing the first big candle after 9:30 instead of waiting for structure.
  • Moving a stop further away once price heads toward it.
  • Trading right into a news release that was on the calendar.
  • Revenge trading after a loss to “get it back” before the session ends.
  • Sizing up after a win because confidence is high, not because the setup is better.

You don’t need to fix all of them at once. Spotting one that keeps showing up is already progress.

Step 4: Note what the market did, briefly

Add two or three lines about the session itself:

  • Did price respect the levels you marked, or ignore them?
  • Was it a trending morning, a choppy one, or something in between?
  • Did a scheduled release change the character of the day?

This isn’t about predicting tomorrow. It’s about building a library of what different kinds of mornings look like, so the next one feels a little more familiar.

Step 5: Pick one thing for tomorrow

End the review with a single sentence: Tomorrow, I’ll focus on ___.

Keep it small and specific. “Trade better” doesn’t help. “Wait for the first five-minute candle to close before entering” or “Stop for the day after two losing trades” does.

Then carry that sentence into tomorrow’s pre-market plan, so the two routines connect.

A 10-minute post-session checklist

  1. Log each trade: time, direction, size, reason, stop, result.
  2. Add the trades you skipped and why.
  3. Grade each trade on process, not profit.
  4. Write down any mistake that showed up more than once.
  5. Note what kind of session it was.
  6. Write one focus for tomorrow.
  7. Close the platform and step away.

How this fits the free live room

In the free weekday live session (Monday through Friday, 9:30 to 10:30 AM ET), you can watch the open unfold in real time and then compare it with your own notes afterward: which levels mattered, where patience paid off, and where the urge to chase showed up.

George Ama (CK), a futures trader since 1998, uses that room to walk through clean charting, structure, and risk thinking for NQ futures, not to hand out guaranteed setups.

If you want to follow along live, visit nqlivetrading.com.

What’s the one mistake that shows up most often in your own trading, and what’s one small rule that might help with it?