Indices forgive bad habits until they do not. My NAS100 journal used to be screenshots and vibes — fine for storytelling, useless for behaviour change. Once I added three boring tags — inventory, chase, time-stop-honoured — the pattern became impossible to ignore.
Findings that stuck within a few weeks:
Chase-tagged trades clustered in the first fifteen minutes after a headline spike. I now stand aside that window unless the plan was written pre-data.
Inventory tags showed I was holding through US open noise “to be right.” Hard time-stops cut that nonsense.
Honoured time-stops correlated with quieter evenings. Broken ones correlated with tilt and give-back.
The tag did not make me smarter. It made the bad pattern visible enough that I stopped negotiating with it mid-session. That is all I ask of a journal field.
What single journal tag changed how you click on indices — or made you stop clicking altogether in a certain window?
The tag that changed my index trading was simply the minute of entry relative to the US cash open. Nearly all my bad NAS100 trades had an entry within the first five minutes after 14:30 London. Once that showed up in the sort, I stopped trading that window altogether instead of trying to do it better.
Your chase cluster after headline spikes sounds like the same thing seen from a different angle. The open is really just a scheduled headline spike.
