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A long position goes against the trader. Price is cheaper now, so adding more lowers the average entry. If price returns even partway, the position breaks even.

Sometimes it works. That is the trap. Winning episodes reinforce the habit, and losing ones are large.

The defining feature is that risk grows exactly when the market is saying the original idea is wrong. A trader who would not open a new position at the current price is effectively opening one by adding.

A cleaner version is to plan scale-in levels before the trade, with a total maximum risk defined up front. That is a deliberate strategy, with the full size and full stop known from the start.

The unplanned version, adding because the trade is losing, is hope with leverage.

A simple self-test: would this position be opened from scratch right now, at this price, with this size? If not, adding is a bad idea.

Has averaging down ever helped or hurt in the records here?

Averaging down cost me one of the worst weeks I've had, and the frustrating part is that it had worked four or five times before that. I was long GBPJPY, it went against me, I added twice because the price looked cheap, and it simply kept falling through a level I was sure would hold. By the time I closed, one idea had eaten nearly three weeks of gains.

Your self-test is the one I use now, almost word for word. Before adding to anything, I ask whether I'd open that exact position fresh at the current price. Nearly every time the honest answer was no, and I was really just trying to fix my break-even point.

The only scaling I still do is planned in advance. I split a full-size trade into two entries at levels written down before the first click, with one stop covering both. If the second level never fills, I simply trade half size, and that has never once hurt me.