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Trading Psychology

Revenge Trading: What the Data Says About Your Worst Trades

Edgeely Team·May 15, 2025·6 min read·0 views

The emotional cycle

You take a loss. You feel the urge to win it back immediately. You place a trade outside your rules — bigger size, worse setup, no plan. You lose again.

This is revenge trading, and almost every active trader has done it. The question isn't whether you do it — it's how much it costs you.

Putting a number on it

In Edgeely, you can filter trades by time gap from the previous trade and compare performance. Traders who run this analysis typically find that their worst-performing trades cluster in the 15–30 minutes after a significant loss.

The P&L impact is rarely small. For many traders, eliminating post-loss reactive trades would turn a losing month into a breakeven month.

The structural fix

Willpower alone doesn't work. You need a structural rule:

No new trades within 20 minutes of a loss exceeding [X].

Log this as a rule in Edgeely. Every time you break it, it shows in your journal. After 30 days of seeing the data, you won't need willpower — the evidence will do the work.