The signature: decisions tethered to your entry
The clearest signature is a sentence that recurs in many traders' thinking: "I will exit when it returns to my entry." That is not a plan but an anchor — your entry price is a personal number that does not exist in the market and says nothing about the asset's value from here.
The practical measurement: review your exit reasons across the last ten trades. How often was the reason "back to break-even" rather than a level defined in advance from market structure? A high first figure means your decisions rest on your number rather than on the chart.
Round numbers are a collective anchor
Anchoring is not always individual. Round numbers — 2,400 on gold, 1.1000 on the euro — anchor thousands of traders simultaneously, so orders cluster there.
That clustering makes them genuinely significant levels with an observable effect, and simultaneously makes them poor places for a stop: a brief overshoot triggers many orders before price returns. See support and resistance and breakouts, where clustering explains the false-break phenomenon.
Why advice fails, and what works instead
A bias is not fixed by advice, because in the moment it does not feel like a bias — it feels like a sound decision based on a correct reading. This is why "be disciplined" and "control your emotions" change nothing: they ask you to notice what is designed not to be noticed.
The practical alternative is for each bias to have a measurable signature in your trade record: a number you compute yourself that confirms or rules it out. This family uses the same reference account as the other risk pages — $1,000 risking 1%, or $10 a trade — so every example is directly comparable.
The limits of these pages are explicit: they describe trading behaviour and decisions, not a psychological state and not a medical diagnosis.
A worked example
Buy gold at 2,400 and price falls to 2,360. The original plan had a stop at 2,380, but you stay "until it comes back to 2,400".
On 0.10 lots the planned loss was $20 per ounce, or $200. At 2,360 it is $400, and it keeps widening while the decision stays tethered to a number the market does not know.
One question breaks the anchor: if I entered now at 2,360, where would I put the stop? The answer gives you a level built from current structure rather than a personal number — the same question that exposes the sunk cost fallacy.
Common mistakes with this term
- Waiting for a return to the entry price instead of exiting at a level built from market structure.
- Placing a stop at a crowded round number, raising the chance a brief overshoot triggers it.
- Holding an old high as a target although the conditions that created it have changed.