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Availability heuristic

Judging how likely something is by how easily an example comes to mind, so vivid and recent events feel far more probable than they are.

The mind treats ease of recall as evidence of frequency. One dramatic memory - a gap that blew through a stop, a friend who made a year of income on one trade - crowds out the hundreds of ordinary days that never made an impression.

Traders feel this after anything memorable. A single overnight gap makes every swing position feel reckless for a month. One screenshot of a huge winner circulating in a forum makes that outcome feel like the normal result of the strategy rather than its rare tail.

Counting beats recalling. If you want to know how often a setup gaps against you, go through the records and count. Your trading-journal exists precisely because memory is a biased sample of your own history.

Related: base-rate-neglect, narrative-fallacy, recency-bias

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