Fear, greed, FOMO & revenge

It is 10:00 ET (21:00 ICT, summer). Your first NQ long is stopped out, then the second. You skip the next valid setup (fear). It works without you (FOMO). You chase the next push at double size (greed and FOMO). It stops you out. You re-enter at once, no checklist (revenge). Eighty minutes, −5.5R, and your daily limit was hit an hour ago. The market did not do this to you. The unmanaged cycle did, and every response you needed was already in your plan, unused. This lesson names the four patterns and the one pre-committed response to each.

Key term

An emotional trigger (tác nhân cảm xúc) is a market event (a stop-out, a run of wins, a fast move) after which a trader’s behaviour reliably departs from the written plan Definition. The pre-committed response (phản ứng cam kết trước) is the action the plan assigns to that trigger, written before the session so it does not have to be decided under pressure House rule.

Chart first: the same evening, two ways

Four patterns, four signatures

Fear (sợ hãi), after losses: hesitation on valid setups, size shrunk below plan, winners closed at the first tick of profit. The cost is not the one missed trade; it is selective execution corrupting your sample. Expectancy (M6.08) needs all the method’s trades, not the comfortable ones. Taking gains too early while holding losers is the disposition effect, measured in individual investors MeasuredOther market and covered in M7.05; that futures day traders show it in the same way is plausible PlausibleOther market.

Greed (tham lam), after wins: oversizing, stretching targets mid-trade, trading outside the planned session “while hot”. Wins can tilt you too: in choice experiments, people took more risk after a prior gain (M7.02 has the study) MeasuredOther market. Overconfidence is euphoria with a position.

FOMO (sợ bỏ lỡ), during fast moves: chasing without a setup, buying the vertical spike. FOMO’s signature is no plan: no setup name, no stop logic, no target. The instant test is “name the setup” House rule. If you cannot name it from your plan, it is FOMO, not a trade.

Revenge (trả thù), after a stop: the M6.10 pattern of immediate re-entry, bigger size, no checklist. It is usually the most expensive of the four because it compounds: size goes up as the account goes down, and each loss raises the urgency of the next attempt. The behaviour is measured in another market: professional Treasury-bond futures traders with morning losses regularly took above-average risk in the afternoon MeasuredOther market. That a retail NQ trader does the same is plausible, not measured PlausibleOther market.

Why the responses are mechanical

The cycle is partly bodily, not a moral failure. In a small study of 17 London floor traders, cortisol (a stress hormone) rose with the volatility of their results and of the market PlausibleOther market. You do not choose that response, and intentions made in the moment do not reliably outrank it. So every response is chosen calmly, before the session, and written down House rule:

• Fear → trade the plan’s size anyway, while you are inside your limits; the sample needs every valid trade.
• Greed → the session profit cap from M6.11 (this course’s house example: stop at +3R); size never rises intraday.
• FOMO → the setup-name test; unnamed means no trade, hands off the keyboard.
• Revenge → the 15-minute cooldown and the circuit breakers (M6.10, M7.02).

The numbers (+3R, −2R, 15 minutes) are house choices, not optimised values; M7.08 shows how to set your loss limits from your own drawdown numbers.

The 10-second rule House rule: when you feel the surge, label it out loud (“that’s FOMO”), then execute the pre-committed response. In laboratory studies, putting a feeling into words reduced the brain’s alarm response to an emotional image PlausibleOther market; whether it changes trading decisions is not yet measured. Labelling does not remove the feeling. It gives you a few seconds in which the plan, not the feeling, decides.

What the data says

So the honest claim is narrow. The patterns are real and measured in other people; the responses are a reasonable, cheap way to stop them, and your own journal is the only place their effect on your results can be measured (drill below).

Worked example: one evening, the full cycle

Synthetic NQ, the figure above. 1R is your standard risk per trade.

• 10:00 and 10:10 ET (21:00 and 21:10 ICT). Two breakout longs, both stopped: −2R. With a −2R daily limit the breaker fires here.
• 10:20. Ignoring the breaker, the trader watches a clean rejection of the prior low (the bar trades to 24,578.50 and closes at 24,594) and skips it: “what if it stops me too?” (fear).
• 10:40. That rejection reaches its +2.5R target without them.
• 10:50. They chase the vertical push near 24,648 at 2× size, no setup name, a 12-point stop (FOMO and greed).
• 11:00. Stopped: −2R (double size).
• 11:10. Immediate re-entry at 1.5× size, no checklist (revenge). Stopped: −1.5R.
• Day: −5.5R. Next morning’s journal tags: FEAR_SKIP, FOMO_CHASE, REVENGE ×2.

The unused responses: the cooldown after stop 2, the breaker at −2R, closing the platform. Same market both timelines; the unmanaged cycle cost the extra −3.5R. Note what the managed day did not do: it did not catch the +2.5R winner. If your daily limit were −3R, the fear response would apply at 10:20 instead: take the rejection at plan size, because you are still inside your limits.

Common mistake: Trying to suppress the emotions (“I need to be disciplined and not feel FOMO”). Suppression fails under load. This course never asks you to stop feeling; it asks you to pre-commit the response so the feeling has nowhere to go. Discipline is not the absence of emotion; it is a plan that outranks it.

Common mistake: Reading the evidence as “the cooldown and the cap are proven”. They are not. What is measured is the behaviour they guard against, in investors and floor traders. Treating a house rule as a measured edge is the same misread as treating a base rate as an edge: keep the rule, and measure it on yourself.

Prop-firm note. On an evaluation or funded account, revenge size after a give-back is how many accounts reach the firm’s loss floor. The firm’s daily loss limit is a firm rule, separate from your house breaker: set your breaker inside it so the firm’s rule never fires first. The Prop Firm course (PROP5.02) covers in-session controls and the psychology of the floor.

Drill: tag ten sessions

For your next ten sessions, sim or live, tag every trade that broke the plan with one of FEAR_SKIP, GREED_SIZE, FOMO_CHASE or REVENGE, and log the R result of each trade, including skipped setups as “would have been” R.

1. Count the tags. Which pattern is most frequent for you?
2. Sum R for tagged and untagged trades separately.
3. Write the one pre-committed response you will add or tighten for your most frequent tag.

What we don’t know yet

• Whether these four responses improve the expectancy of NQ day traders: not yet measured, by our lab or, as far as we found, in published research on retail futures traders (search date 2026-11-09).
• Whether affect labelling changes trading decisions, as opposed to lab measures of emotion: not yet measured.
• The best values for the cap, the breaker and the cooldown: not yet measured; they are house choices.

Recap

• Four patterns, four signatures: fear skips valid setups, greed oversizes after wins, FOMO trades without a setup name, revenge compounds losses at once.
• Every response is mechanical and pre-committed (cooldown, breaker, profit cap, setup-name test), because the cycle is partly bodily and in-the-moment intentions are unreliable.
• The 10-second rule: label the emotion out loud, then execute the response.
• The behaviours are measured in other markets; the responses are house rules, plausible for NQ, and your journal is where to test them.

Further reading

• Shefrin, H. and Statman, M. (1985), “The disposition to sell winners too early and ride losers too long: theory and evidence”, Journal of Finance 40(3), 777–790.
• Coates, J. M. and Herbert, J. (2008), “Endogenous steroids and financial risk taking on a London trading floor”, PNAS 105(16): hormones and trading results in 17 floor traders.
• Lieberman, M. D. et al. (2007), “Putting feelings into words: affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli”, Psychological Science 18(5).
• Dr. Brett Steenbarger on CBT tools for traders: revenge trading, burnout, and self-talk interventions mid-session.
• Surprising Advice From Dr. Steenbarger (SMB Capital): build the review around what worked, not only the emotional failures.
• Our lab: no measurement yet of trader emotions or of these responses (search date 2026-11-09).

Next: M7.07 shows why surviving these cycles matters for the maths: a method is judged on its whole sample, and samples are noisy. M7.05 covered the biases underneath the emotions.

Educational content only — not financial advice. Futures trading involves substantial risk of loss.