What is the most important field to add to a gold trade journal for sweeps?

Excursion depth in dollars per ounce. It is the single clearest quantitative separator between a genuine stop grab and a repricing move, and grouping trades by depth bucket usually reveals where the setup's expectancy actually lives.

How many sweep trades do I need before the edge-decay metrics are meaningful?

Treat 20 to 30 trades as the minimum rolling window for R by session and excursion-depth buckets. Fewer than that and normal variance can look identical to genuine decay.

Should I journal sweep trades that violated the checklist?

Yes, and tag them as violations explicitly, independent of whether they won or lost. Excluding them from the strategy's performance measurement while still recording them is what lets you separate execution problems from strategy problems.

What does maximum adverse excursion tell me that win/loss does not?

It shows how close a winning trade came to failing. A win with MAE close to the full planned stop had very little margin for error and should be reviewed as carefully as a loss, because a slightly worse fill would have turned it into one.

How often should I review the sweep journal metrics?

Weekly, once at least 20 trades exist. Daily review on a small sample reacts to noise rather than signal; a weekly cadence on a rolling 20-30 trade window is stable enough to catch real drift.

Journaling the Gold Liquidity Sweep — Fields, Tags, Metrics

A useful gold-sweep journal captures level type, excursion depth in dollars per ounce, candles to reclaim, driver status, and session window on every trade, then reports edge-decay metrics — R by session, maximum adverse excursion, and hit rate by excursion-depth bucket — on a rolling sample rather than a lifetime average.

A gold-sweep journal earns its keep by capturing level type, excursion depth in dollars per ounce, reclaim time in candles and minutes, driver-check status, and session window on every trade, alongside the standard entry, exit and size fields, recorded at the time of the trade rather than reconstructed afterwards.

The metrics that reveal edge decay are R by session, maximum adverse excursion relative to the planned stop, and hit rate by excursion-depth bucket, each calculated on a rolling 20-to-30-trade window rather than a lifetime average so that recent drift is not hidden behind an earlier strong run.

In the GoldHunts journal, MetaTrader 5 sync handles entry, exit, size and session attribution automatically, while level type, excursion depth, driver check and checklist result are added by hand at the time of the trade — with a weekly review of the rolling metrics prompting a size reduction when two or more deteriorate together.