Revenge Trading Detector

Revenge trading means taking a trade to win back a loss while abandoning your normal plan. This detector is a manual behaviour check using your answers about timing, size, setup and emotion. It does not inspect your account. Its score is a preset rule, not a diagnosis. The displayed loss totals and recovery-trade counts are unreliable because you never enter the actual amounts.

What changes after a loss?

A losing trade alone does not establish revenge trading. The useful question is whether the loss changed the next decision: taking a weaker setup, increasing exposure without a written reason, moving a stop or trading beyond a planned session limit.

A quick new entry can also be part of an existing strategy. Preserve that explanation when reviewing the sequence. Judge the decision against the plan written before the loss, rather than using the next trade’s profit or loss to decide whether it was disciplined.

For more detail on the behaviour, see revenge trading explained. This page concentrates on what the detector can actually measure from your answers.

Six signs you may be revenge trading

These are behaviours you can check in your own day. None of them proves revenge trading alone. Several together, soon after a loss, are worth stopping for.

• Bigger size. You trade more quantity than your plan allows for that setup, mainly to recover quickly.
• Faster entries. The next trade comes within minutes of the loss, without waiting for your setup.
• Ignored or moved stops. You widen or remove a stop because the trade has to work.
• Lower-quality setups. You take a chart you would normally skip.
• Trading past your session limit. You keep going after the number of trades or the loss you set before the day.
• Thinking in terms of the loss. Your reason for the trade is the amount to recover, not the chart.

The detector above turns a few of these into inputs: time since the last trade, size compared with normal, setup quality and emotional state. It cannot see your actual orders, so the final judgement is yours.

Why traders try to get even

Loss aversion is the best-known explanation. It comes from Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky's 1979 prospect theory, which says people feel losses more strongly than equal gains. After a loss, the sting pushes you toward any action that might remove it, and a larger bet looks like the quickest way.

Three related habits add to it. Break-even anchoring means treating your entry price or the start of the day as the only acceptable finish. Sunk cost means trying to justify money already lost by putting more in. Ego means the loss feels like a verdict on you, so you want to prove the market wrong.

Naming the pull helps, because it turns a feeling into something you can write down. Our guide to trading psychology basics covers the wider ideas.

Revenge trading and tilt

Tilt is the emotional state: frustrated, rushed and not thinking clearly. Revenge trading is one behaviour that tilt can produce. You can be on tilt and still do nothing, and you can revenge trade without feeling angry, for example out of a calm but mistaken belief that you are owed a recovery. Our tilt glossary entry has more on the state.

Compare your answers with your usual trading plan

Keep the definition of normal size consistent. A position with a wider stop can risk more money at the same quantity. Conversely, a smaller quantity may reflect a planned adjustment. Write down both quantity and planned rupee loss when you review the decision outside this form.

The time field has a separate limitation: entering zero minutes is treated as a preset interval. It also stops distinguishing very long intervals in the score. Do not treat the result as a precise measure of how much a break has helped.

Last Trade Result changes the preset money outputs rather than the main score. With timing, position-size category, setup quality and emotion held constant, selecting a profit or a loss can leave that score unchanged. Review the actual post-loss decision separately.

Worked example: why the detector gives a high score

Consider a fictional situation: Large Loss selected; 10 minutes since closing; Double or more position size; D Setup (Forcing it); and Angry/Upset. The form translates those choices into fixed internal values. It does not observe how many trades you made.

• Angry/Upset supplies an assumed count of 4. Multiplied by the score weight of 10, that contributes 40.
• The time term is 100 − 10 = 90.
• Double or more contributes 100, and D Setup contributes 70.
• The score calculation is (40 + 90 + 100 + 70) ÷ 4 = 75.

For these inputs, the cards read High Risk, STOP Trading Now and Critical. Those are fixed labels from the formula. A score of 75 is not a probability that you will revenge trade or lose money. The assumed count is especially important: the form does not know your actual number of post-loss trades.

Use this example to understand why several warning signs raise the score. Do not use it to validate the monetary cards. The same answers can describe accounts and trading histories with very different financial results.

Which output cards deserve caution?

Total Loss Today assigns assumed loss amounts and counts to dropdown categories. Trades to Recover and Break-even Trades then build on those assumptions. Ignore them when checking actual account losses or deciding how many more trades to take.

The risk, status, warning, cooldown, size and plan-adherence cards are rule-based prompts. Their labels can disagree in emphasis because each uses a different cutoff. A Safe to Trade label cannot establish that a trade meets your rules, that you are calm, or that an order is suitable.

The detector has no daily account balance, actual sequence of entries, costs, live positions or verified setup data. It cannot calculate the financial damage caused by revenge trading from this form. Repeatedly changing answers until the status looks reassuring only changes the inputs.

A record that makes the next review useful

• Save the previous trade’s actual closing time and result after charges.
• Write the next setup’s entry condition and invalidation before entering.
• Record your usual and proposed quantity, stop distance and rupee exposure.
• Note the emotion and the reason for changing size, if any.
• After closing, compare the decision with the original plan, whether it won or lost.

The guide to avoiding revenge trading covers planning a response to these situations. A written pause rule can give you something concrete to check. The detector cannot enforce that pause or stop a broker order.

CME Group’s trading-psychology material describes how fear of losses can affect judgment. It also distinguishes simulated trading from the experience of risking real capital. That supports paying attention to your behaviour; it does not validate this detector’s scoring weights or a universal break duration.

OneTradeJournal lets you log trades by hand with emotions, mistakes and plan deviations. Its behaviour flags are rules of thumb. For the financial side of a size change, compare the position-size calculation using the actual stop distance.

A post-loss routine you can copy

A routine works only if you decide it before the loss, while you are calm. The steps below are a template to adapt. Any times or limits in them are choices for you to make, not research findings.

1. Close the trade and write down the result after charges.
2. Step away from the screen for a fixed time you chose in advance.
3. Re-read your written plan and your daily loss limit.
4. Ask whether the next setup would have qualified before the loss happened.
5. If yes, take it at your normal size with the stop already decided. If no, stop trading and review.

A daily loss limit is the hard backstop: a rupee amount or number of losing trades at which you stop for the day. Your broker may offer risk controls, but the rule is yours to keep. See how to avoid revenge trading and the one trade a day strategy, which removes the second chance to chase.

Finding revenge trades in your journal

Revenge trades show up as patterns in your own log. Sort your trades by time and look for entries soon after a loss, a jump in quantity from the previous trade, trades tagged with a mistake or plan deviation, and trades with an emotion such as anger or frustration. A cluster on one day is the usual picture.

OneTradeJournal is a manual journal. You log each trade yourself and can record emotions, mistakes, plan deviation, stop, target, strategy and notes. It shows behaviour flags, which are rules of thumb, a discipline score and a pre-trade checklist that warns but cannot block an order. Every trade is entered by hand, with no broker connection. Try the trading discipline scorecard alongside this detector.

After a revenge-trading day

Do not try to win the loss back tomorrow. Write what happened in plain words: the first loss, the trade that broke the plan, and what you felt. Then keep the next session small, with your usual size and one planned setup. The aim of the next day is to follow the plan, not to repair the account. Repeated bad days are a reason to review your rules with a mentor or a registered adviser.

SEBI's updated study, published in a press release dated 23 September 2024, found that 93% of individual equity F&O traders incurred losses between FY22 and FY24, so many traders face this problem. It describes a group result, not a prediction for you.

Questions about revenge-trading checks

Sources

• CME Group: emotion and trading decisions (opened 16 October 2026).