One session can quietly bleed while the rest of your book pays. And you control when you trade.
Edge is rarely uniform across the clock. The London open, the New York open, the quiet mid-afternoon — each has its own volatility, its own crowd, its own behavior. Bucket your trades by session and you often find one carrying a hidden negative expectancy, cancelling out what the rest of your book earns. It is not that you are a worse trader at 3pm; it is that your setup has no edge then.
You do not control whether a trade wins. You do control when you sit down. That makes a losing session the cheapest leak in trading to close — you simply stop trading it. No new skill, no new setup, no market cooperation required. Dropping a persistently negative session is a pure, structural improvement to your numbers that costs you nothing but the trades that were bleeding.
Compare net R by session, not gut feel — the Stats timing tab breaks it down for you. A session that stays negative across a real sample is a candidate to cut. Pull it for a block and watch whether your overall numbers improve. If you want to keep it, trade it smaller until it proves positive on its own, rather than subsidizing it from your good hours.
Reading about R is the easy part. The journal makes you keep the stats — grade the setup before you know how it ends, and hear the one thing to fix next.
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