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Indicator shopping

Adding tools to a chart until one of them agrees with the position you already want to take.

With enough indicators available, some subset will always support any direction. Shopping is the process of scrolling through them until the agreeable ones appear, then treating that as analysis.

It usually starts after a run of losses, when the honest conclusion would be that conditions do not suit the strategy. Adding a new oscillator feels like progress and costs nothing in the moment, which is why charts accumulate layers over a bad month.

Fix the toolkit in writing and change it only through a dated review with reasons and a testing plan. A chart that looks different every week is a record of your emotions, not of the market.

Related: motivated-reasoning, illusion-of-validity, strategy-hopping, confirmation-bias

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