Measuring your results against a curated feed of other people's best days, which makes adequate performance feel like failure.
Comparison is unavoidable and the sample is rigged. You see other traders' peaks against your own full record, including the boring weeks and the mistakes nobody posts.
The behavioural consequence is size. A trader whose plan is working will raise risk to close a gap with a benchmark that is partly fictional, and the increase arrives without any change in edge.
Compare against your own past instead: last quarter's adherence, expectancy, and drawdown. If you need an external benchmark, use a published index over a full cycle rather than a screenshot from someone's good Tuesday.
Original diagrams for the ideas on this page. Illustrative, not real market data.
Expectancy: the average trade. Forty trades sorted by outcome: 24 small losses and 16 larger wins. Weighting each side by how often it happens gives the average result per trade, marked here by the dashed line at +$120.
Educational only, not advice. Spotted an error? Post in Site Feedback.