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Copium

Cope plus opium; the rationalisations traders inhale to avoid accepting a loss or a mistake.

Copium is the joke word for motivated-reasoning after the fact. It covers the whole family: it is only a loss if I sell, the timeframe was always longer, the market is wrong, this is accumulation.

The word is useful precisely because it is mocking. Naming your own copium out loud is a crude but effective form of affect-labelling, and communities that use it on each other tend to cut losses faster than ones that offer sympathy.

Related: hopium, motivated-reasoning, denial, bag-holding-psychology

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