Anchoring Bias
The tendency for the first or most salient number — your entry price, a round level, an old high — to dominate later judgement even when it carries no information. Full guide →
Averaging Down
Adding to a losing position to lower its average entry price. Planned scale-ins can be strategy; unplanned averaging to defend a loss is the sunk cost fallacy in action. Full guide →
Behavioural Finance
The field studying how psychology shapes financial decisions — documenting systematic biases like loss aversion, overconfidence and the disposition effect.
Brain Freeze
The in-trade paralysis where a trader cannot act on a clear signal — a stress-response state where threat physiology overrides the trading plan.
Chasing
Entering after a move has already run, without your setup's conditions — the behavioural signature of FOMO. Full guide →
Cognitive Bias
A systematic, predictable error in judgement built into human thinking — not a personal weakness but a documented feature of the brain's shortcuts. Full guide →
Confirmation Bias
Seeking and overweighting information that agrees with the position or view you already hold, while filtering out what contradicts it.
Cooling-Off Rule
A pre-written rule mandating a pause after any loss — the primary mechanical breaker of the revenge trading loop. Full guide →
Daily Loss Limit
A hard, pre-decided maximum loss for the day that ends the session when hit — the structural guard that makes catastrophic days impossible.
Discipline (Trading)
The consistent execution of a pre-committed plan under emotional pressure — built through structure (pre-commitment, environment, protocol, review), not willpower. Full guide →
Disposition Effect
The documented tendency to sell winners too early and hold losers too long — loss aversion's signature in exit behaviour. Full guide →
Drawdown
The decline from an equity peak to a subsequent trough — the psychological test where most strategies and traders are actually broken.
Edge
A positive statistical expectancy — the reason a setup makes money across a large sample. Psychology cannot create an edge; it determines whether an edge gets executed.
Emotional Hijack
The moment acute emotion overrides rational planning — attention narrows, time-horizon shrinks, and the trading plan becomes psychologically invisible.
Emotional Neutrality
The trained state where profits don't create euphoria and losses don't create tilt — one of the four working areas of the Elearn ProMax curriculum. Full guide →
Execution Gap
The distance between what a trader knows they should do and what they actually do under pressure — the gap trading psychology exists to close.
Expectancy
The average amount won or lost per trade over a large sample — (win rate × average win) − (loss rate × average loss).
Expiry-Day Psychology
The compressed emotional environment of weekly index-option expiries — fast premium moves that amplify FOMO, urgency and lottery-ticket thinking. Full guide →
Fear of Missing Out (FOMO)
Entering a trade because the move already started and being left out feels unbearable — driven by social comparison and the brain's reward system. Full guide →
Gambler's Fallacy
Believing that after a run of one outcome, the opposite becomes 'due' — e.g. doubling size after losses because a win 'has to come'.
Hindsight Bias
The after-the-fact feeling that an outcome was obvious all along — 'I knew it would reverse' — which corrupts honest review and inflates confidence.
Journal (Trading)
A structured record of trades including the emotion and plan-adherence behind each — the raw material of behavioural correction, not just a P&L log.
Loss Aversion
The finding, from Kahneman and Tversky's prospect theory, that losses are felt roughly twice as intensely as equivalent gains. Full guide →
Lottery-Ticket Trading
Buying far out-of-the-money options because they are 'cheap' — accepting terrible odds for the vivid memory of rare large payoffs.
Money Blueprint
The set of beliefs about money, loss and risk a trader carries into every position — one of the four Elearn ProMax working areas.
Overconfidence Bias
Systematically overrating your skill, knowledge and control — strongest immediately after wins, when risk discipline is quietly dissolved. Full guide →
Overtrading
Taking more trades than your plan and edge justify — from boredom, greed, revenge or stimulation. Full guide →
Position Sizing
Deciding how much to risk per trade — psychologically, the control that keeps every loss within the range your judgement can survive.
Pre-Commitment
Making every possible decision before the session — setups, size, caps, limits — so market hours require execution, not judgement.
Probabilistic Thinking
Treating each trade as one draw from a large sample rather than a verdict — the mental frame that makes individual losses tolerable.
Process-Based Trading
Measuring success by adherence to a tested process rather than by any single outcome — the foundation of professional consistency.
Prospect Theory
Kahneman and Tversky's Nobel-recognised model of decision-making under risk — the source of loss aversion and the reference-point effects behind most trading biases.
Recency Bias
Overweighting recent events when judging probabilities — the last three trades rewriting your risk judgement. Full guide →
Revenge Trading
Placing impulsive, often oversized trades to win back money just lost — driven by anger and threatened ego rather than the plan. Full guide →
Risk Capital
Money that can be lost entirely without affecting your essential financial life — the only money that belongs in trading.
R-Multiple
Outcome measured in units of initial risk (a 2R win made twice what was risked) — a framing that strips emotional weight from rupee figures.
Self-Attribution Bias
Crediting wins to skill and blaming losses on bad luck — the mechanism that lets overconfidence survive honest-looking reviews.
Self-Correction
Systematically identifying and correcting repeated technical, behavioural and execution mistakes — the first Elearn ProMax working area.
Stop-Loss
A pre-placed order capping the maximum loss on a position — psychologically, a decision made calm so it doesn't have to be made scared.
Sunk Cost Fallacy
Letting money, time or effort already spent drive present decisions — 'I'm in too deep to quit now'. Full guide →
Tilt
A state of emotional dysregulation — borrowed from poker — where decisions are driven by frustration rather than process; the state revenge trading lives in.
Trade Cap
A hard maximum number of trades per session — the mechanical control that converts overtrading from a temptation into arithmetic. Full guide →
Trader Identity
The self-concept a trader operates from — the stage where following the plan is who you are, not something forced; trained through repetition and review.
Trading Psychology
The management of the emotions, habits and mental patterns that drive trading decisions — the layer that determines whether knowledge becomes execution. Full guide →
Win Rate
The percentage of trades that profit — meaningful only alongside average win/loss size; chasing high win rates is itself a bias trap.
Want the full system these terms come from? Start with the complete trading psychology guide, explore the cognitive bias library, or measure your own patterns with the free Trader’s Mind Scorecard.