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Decision fatigue

The decline in decision quality across a long session, as the effort of choosing depletes and you drift toward defaults, impulses, or doing nothing.

Decisions are not free. After several hours of watching, filtering, and rejecting, the same person makes worse choices with the same information. The failure mode is not random: tired deciders take the easy option, which in markets means either the impulsive entry or the avoided exit.

Most traders can point to the hour where their day falls apart. It is usually late in a session, after a stretch of nothing happening, and the trades taken there look nothing like the ones taken at the open.

Reduce the number of decisions rather than trying to make them better. Pre-defined setups, written size rules, resting orders, and a hard finish time each remove choices from the part of the day when you choose worst.

Related: cognitive-load, boredom-trading, checklist-discipline, personal-circuit-breaker

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