How to stop forcing trades

What forcing a trade looks like

A forced trade is a trade your own rules do not support. Either it is not your setup, or it comes outside the hours you wrote down. It tends to show up in three ways.

The first is boredom. Nothing has set up for an hour, so you talk yourself into B and C setups. Traders call these boredom trades, and they can creep in when you are up on the eval and the day feels slow.

The second is being behind. You are red on the day, and the next entry is about getting back to break even. The setup did not pick the trade. The need to make it back did. Traders call this trading your PnL instead of your system, and at its worst it is a revenge trade.

The third is trading out of your window. The setup may even be real, but it comes at a time you said you would not trade: the first minutes of the open, the lunch chop, or after your own cutoff.

A fourth kind sits close by. You pass on a setup, it runs without you, and you chase it. That is FOMO, and it has its own section in the habit guide, linked below.

Why you force trades

Being behind changes what a trade is for. In real-money experiments, people who had already lost found bets that offered a chance to break even especially attractive, which the researchers called the break-even effect (Management Science, 1990). The same paper found that a prior gain raised risk-taking too, which it called the house money effect.

Professionals do it as well. A study of proprietary traders at the Chicago Board of Trade found they appeared highly loss-averse and regularly took above-average risk in the afternoon to recover from morning losses (Journal of Finance, 2005).

Boredom is simpler. The screen is open for hours, the plan may only produce one or two setups, and a B setup starts to look good enough.

Trading more also costs more. In a study of 66,465 households at a discount broker from 1991 to 1996, the ones that traded most earned 11.4% a year while the market returned 17.9% (Journal of Finance, 2000). Those were stock accounts, and the study did not measure forced trades, but trading more did not pay them.

Four rules to write before the session

Write these while you are flat, before the session starts, as plain yes or no lines.

1. Write a setup checklist. List what your setup needs, one yes or no per line. For example: price is at a level I marked before the open, my entry signal printed on my timeframe, and I can place my stop before I enter. If any line is a no, the trade is forced, however close it looks.

2. Write a trade window. Write the hours you trade, for example the first 90 minutes after the open, and the times you never trade, like the lunch chop. Your window has to sit inside your firm's hours. Many firms set a time you must be flat by and close open positions for you near it, and some plans allow overnight holds, so check your firm's rules page.

3. Set a max trades cap. Write the number and how you count it. Your platform may let you set a daily trade cap. At least one counts every entry and every exit as a trade, so 3 round trips with one entry and one exit each count as 6 there. Match the setting to your count.

4. Pick a loss count that ends the day. Being behind is one trigger the research points to, so pick the number of losing trades that ends your session, for example 2. The full set of stop rules, including a dollar line inside your DLL and a pause after every loss, is on our page about how to stop trading after a loss, listed under Read next.

What your firm checks, and what it does not

Prop firm rules cap dollars, size and time: a daily loss limit on some plans, a max loss limit or trailing drawdown, a max number of contracts and set trading hours. At some firms, hitting the DLL flattens you and locks new trades until the next session, and the max loss limit is what ends the account.

None of the firm rules pages we read set a daily trade cap for manual trading, and none checks whether a trade was your setup. The firm only notices a forced trade when its result trips one of its rules, such as a loss limit.

That part is your job. If your platform has a personal trade cap and a daily lock, set them before the open. On at least one platform, once you lock those settings for the day, you cannot change them until the next trading day, and support cannot reverse the lock. Rules differ by plan, so check your own firm's rules page.

How to check whether you forced a trade

After the close, answer two questions about each trade with yes or no. Was it my setup, with every line on the checklist a yes? Was it inside my window?

Any trade with a no is a forced trade. Count them, wins included. A forced trade that worked still broke a rule, so it counts the same as one that lost.

Next to each forced trade, write one word: bored, behind or window. Write chased if you took a setup after passing on it and watching it run.

After a couple of weeks, look at which word repeats. If it is behind, tighten your loss count, and read the Overtraded section of the habit guide, linked below. If it is chased, the FOMO section of the habit guide, linked below, covers why a pass should be final for the session.

Track the total each week. If it falls, the rules are holding. If it does not, tighten the rule behind the word that repeats.

How Psyke helps you check

Psyke is a trading psychology journal for prop firm futures traders. You write your rules in your own words, including your setup, your window and your max trades. After the close, you log each session in about two minutes, each trade against each rule. You can also import your trading platform's CSV export.

On the Core plan, once you have five marked trades and one rule broken three times, Psyke names your Psyke Issue: the rule you break most. With more breaks, it shows when you break it, such as after a loss or after your first trade of the session, what sets it off and what it costs you in dollars from the amounts you logged.

Psyke does not connect to your broker and never says what to trade or how big.

Write your setup and window rules in Psyke and check them after every session. The free plan needs no card.

Not financial advice. Futures trading carries substantial risk of loss.