According to PANews, a trader's biggest mistakes often stem from psychological imbalances rather than technical errors. Here are some common errors traders should avoid:
1. Anchoring Bias: Traders often subjectively fixate on a certain price, which can influence their decision-making. For instance, if a trader enters the cryptocurrency market when Bitcoin is priced at $52,000, then Bitcoin at $61,000 seems expensive. Conversely, if another trader enters when Bitcoin is at $71,000, then $61,000 seems cheap.
2. Recency Bias: This refers to the tendency to remember and consider the most recent information important. Traders may carry information from recent trades into their next trades, leading to potential mistakes.
3. Loss Aversion: Traders often experience greater emotional fluctuations when facing losses than when making profits. For example, the pain of losing $100 in a trade often outweighs the joy of gaining $100. This error can lead traders to lock in profits prematurely for fear of these gains diminishing or turning into losses.
4. Endowment Effect: When traders hold an asset, they often overestimate its value. This subjective emotion makes it difficult for them to sell at a loss or take profits, as they rely more on their inner expectations rather than the actual market situation to judge the future price of the asset.
5. Herd Mentality: Whether blindly following the crowd or deliberately going against it, both carry risks. Traders should stick to their trading plans and avoid impulsive actions due to herd mentality. Consideration of the crowd's behavior should only occur during objective market sentiment analysis.
6. Availability Heuristic: Traders often pay too much attention to recent market sentiment and events. For example, a recent market crash may cause traders to be overly cautious.
7. Survivorship Bias: As we often hear success stories and rarely hear about failures, traders may subjectively believe they have a high probability of success.
8. Framing Effect: A trader's emotions and confidence play a key role in the trading process. Positive emotions often lead to underestimating risks, while negative emotions can lead to overestimating risks.
9. Confirmation Bias: Traders often tend to look for data that confirms their views. For example, if you are bullish on an asset, you will search for all information supporting the asset's rise and ignore bearish information.
10. Captain Hindsight: Traders often feel they had foreseen the outcome after an event has occurred. This error can lead to overconfidence in future predictions and incorrect judgments about one's trading abilities.