Santa’s Not the Only One Making a List: How Yours Should Look

Remember the Trading Journal article we posted back in January? It’s time to review that.

🎄 The Year-End Ritual Traders Love to Avoid

December is a beautiful time of year — especially if you’re a trader taking stock of a full year of wins, lessons, and the kind of experience you simply can’t get from any textbook.

While most people are making holiday wish lists, you can make something far more valuable: a year-end audit of your own performance.

Before you look into the story of 2026, you should review your story of 2025 — and decide which chapters deserve a sequel.

🧾 1. Start With the Big Picture: Your P&L Story

Traders love to zoom into charts, but this review starts with a wide-angle lens. Open your profit-and-loss statement (the whole thing) and ask yourself what story it tells.

Not: “Did I make money?”

But:
• Where and when did I make money?
• How consistently did I make money?
• Where and when did I lose money?

Was your year a smooth trend or a choppy range?

Did profits arrive steadily in a diversified low-risk manner or in one giant lucky month that’s now carrying the annual narrative on its back?

How many trades on average did you open in any given month? Were you slammed by economic data or actually traded events successfully?

If your P&L looks like Mount Everest followed by a ski slope, that’s a clue. If it looks like a gentle staircase, that’s another.

An honest P&L audit tells you who you actually are as a trader, not who you strive to be.

📆 2. Month-by-Month: Your Market Seasons

Markets have seasons, and so do traders. This is where you break your year into 12 chapters and ask:

• Which months were your strongest?
• Which months were your weakest?
• Did your performance correlate with volatility?
• Did you trade better in calm markets or turbulent ones?
• Did a single macro theme carry your results?

Most traders discover they perform better in certain environments — trending markets, earnings season, AI mania, crypto volatility — and worse in others.

Knowing your seasonality helps you (a) avoid forcing trades in tough conditions and (b) push harder when the market aligns with your natural rhythm.

For example, you don’t trade aggressively in a month where your data says you tend to perform poorly.

📈 3. Where You Actually Traded

Every trader has a version of themselves in their head:

“I trade mostly macro FX,” or “I’m an equities person,” or “I invest in crypto but only real-use cases.”

But your year-end list should reflect actual activity, not self-depiction. Pop open your books and find out:

• Which asset classes did you trade the most?
• Did your biggest wins come from the same place as your biggest losses?
• Did you over-concentrate on a theme (AI leaders)? FX majors? Meme-adjacent microcaps?
• Did diversification help or were you secretly just running one giant tech exposure?

If 80% of your profits came from one market, that’s a strength, but also a dependency. If 80% of your losses came from one market, that’s more of a warning than a lesson.

Knowing where you think and where you sink is the foundation of your 2026 positioning.

💸 4. Identify Your Wins and Pain Points

Every trader has signature wins and signature wounds. Look into yours and try to figure out why they happened.

• Were they disciplined trades?
• Or were they lucky timing in Nvidia NVDA, Bitcoin BTCUSD, or USDJPY ?
• Were they tied to a setup you can reproduce in 2026?
• Or do they fall under “I shouldn’t count on that again”?

Then look at your largest losses:

• Were they concentrated?
• Repeated?
• Emotional?
• Spread across many small trades or a few oversized ones?

Think of your setbacks as valuable inputs for your 2026 strategy.

🧭 5. Turn Insight Into Strategy for 2026

Now comes the true purpose of the list: How will you position for the new year based on what you learned?

Consider:
• Which asset classes earned the right to your attention in 2026?
• Which ones should you scale down or eliminate?
• How concentrated should you allow your positions to get?
• Are you better as a trend trader, a mean-reverter, a news trader?
• Which months or conditions will you push hardest?
• Where will you intentionally step back?

🎁 The Real Gift of the Year Is Reflection

Santa may have a list of who's naughty and nice, but yours is better because it tells you what kind of trader you've become, and what kind you’re aiming to be.

A year-end audit is among the closest things traders have to compounding wisdom.

You can’t control the 2026 market (especially with a new Fed chair stepping in) — but you can control how prepared you are for it.

And that preparation begins with a list only you can make. Not just of trades and profits, but of patterns.

Make your list. Read it twice. Think about it.

And step into 2026 trading like someone who knows themselves.

Off to you: Are you ready to look back into what you did this year and learn the harsh truths and valuable lessons? Share your thoughts in the comments!