By Sofia Harchich | Trading Psychologist & Behavioural Finance Writer Impostor syndrome in trading has a peculiar distribution: it appears most often in traders whose results have started to work. The unprofitable trader rarely reports it. They have a straightforward problem and they know what it is. The report comes from the person three months…
By Sofia Harchich | Trading Psychologist & Behavioural Finance Writer Scarcity mindset in trading is unusually hard to see from the inside, because every behaviour it produces looks like good practice. Smaller size than the plan specified. A valid setup passed over. Profit taken at a third of target. Two weeks out of the market…
By Sofia Harchich | Trading Psychologist & Behavioural Finance Writer Hindsight bias in trading journals is the reason a diligent record can run for eight months and change nothing. The entries are honest. The trader is not lying to the page, and would pass a polygraph on every line. What has happened is subtler and…
By Sofia Harchich | Trading Psychologist & Behavioural Finance Writer Why traders move their stop loss is a question with an unusually well-documented answer, and the documentation almost never reaches the trader, who is generally told it is a discipline problem. The reasoning that arrives at the moment of moving it is worth attending to,…
By Sofia Harchich | Trading Psychologist & Behavioural Finance Writer How to follow your trading plan is a question usually asked by someone who read their plan that morning. That detail is the whole problem, and it is the one the standard answer cannot accommodate. The information was present. The rules were legible. You could…
By Sofia Harchich | Trading Psychologist & Behavioural Finance Writer | thewealthmirror.com The loss aversion ego trading account problem is usually described as two forces acting on one balance. It is more accurate, and more useful, to treat it as a single compound with a specific signature. The loss aversion ego trading account compound has…
By Sofia Harchich | Trading Psychologist & Behavioural Finance Writer | thewealthmirror.com FOMO breakout trading psychology is usually described in terms of what the trader felt, which is the least reliable evidence available about it. Feelings during a breakout are reconstructed afterwards, from the outcome, by someone who now knows whether the entry worked. What…
By Sofia Harchich | Trading Psychologist & Behavioural Finance Writer | thewealthmirror.com Trading psychological triggers are usually discussed as inventory: things you have, that should be identified, and ideally removed. The framing produces a familiar and unproductive exercise. A trader lists their triggers — losses above a certain size, gaps against a position, a particular…
By Sofia Harchich | Trading Psychologist & Behavioural Finance Writer | thewealthmirror.com Ventral vagal trading is difficult to write about usefully, because the regulated state is defined mostly by the absence of things. No urgency. No narrowing. No sense that the outcome must be settled today. Described that way it sounds like a mood, and…
By Sofia Harchich | Trading Psychologist & Behavioural Finance Writer | thewealthmirror.com Dorsal shutdown trading is the only nervous system state that gets mistaken for good trading, which is why it does so much damage before anyone examines it. A trader in a mobilised state is visibly agitated — fast entries, oversized positions, obvious to…
