What Emotional Tags Reveal

[Fairman]

What Emotional Tags Reveal

A journal tags each trade with an emotional state. Calm: 40 trades, average plus 0.28R. Rushed: 15 trades, average minus 0.40R. Revenge: 5 trades, average minus 1.2R. Bored: 10 trades, average minus 0.20R.

Compute totals. Calm: 40 times 0.28 is plus 11.2R. Rushed: 15 times minus 0.40 is minus 6.0R. Revenge: 5 times minus 1.2 is minus 6.0R. Bored: 10 times minus 0.20 is minus 2.0R. Overall: 11.2 minus 6.0 minus 6.0 minus 2.0, which is minus 2.8R over 70 trades.

The account lost 2.8R in total, yet the calm trades made 11.2R. All of the profit came from trades taken in a good state, and more than all of it was lost in the other states.

Revenge trades are the extreme: only 5 trades, 7 percent of the total, cost 6R, the same as 15 rushed trades. Each revenge trade cost 1.2R, more than a full stop, which suggests oversized or unprotected positions.

Compute the potential gain from skipping them. Dropping revenge, rushed, and bored trades would leave plus 11.2R over 40 trades.

How to act? Identify triggers for each state. Add a pre-trade check on emotional state, with a rule that anything but calm means no trade or half size. Add a hard stop after a loss, as in the post-loss routine.

The tags are self-reported, so they need honesty, but even approximate labels reveal patterns.

Exercise: add an emotional state tag to your next twenty trades and total the results by tag.