my two-strike rule and why i keep breaking it anyway

so my whole process on perps boils down to like three rules and honestly rule 3 is the only one i actually struggle with. 1. size off the invalidation, not off leverage. i pick where the idea is dead first, then work backwards to a position that only loses what i'm ok losing. the leverage number that pops out is whatever it is, i genuinely don't look at it anymore. some setups it's tiny, some it's chunky, doesn't matter, the loss is the same. 2. no adding to losers. ever. if i wanted more i should've bought more at the start. i learned this the expensive way during a nice long weekend liquidation cascade that i will not be describing further. 3. two stopouts in a session = i'm done, close the laptop. and THIS is the one i can't hold. because after two losses i'm not in a research mood, i'm in a revenge mood, and the third trade always feels like the obvious one. it never is. i went back through my own log and my third-trade-of-the-day winrate is embarrassing compared to my first. not slightly worse. properly worse. things i've tried: setting an alarm, telling my gf to yell at me, physically going for a walk. the walk works best but only if i actually leave before opening the chart again. curious what other people do here. do you enforce a hard stop on trades per session or per day, or do you just accept that after two losses you're a worse trader and size down instead of stopping? i keep wondering if a "cut size by half" rule would be more sustainable than a full stop, because a rule i actually follow beats a perfect rule i break every week.
CryptoKarl
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3 replies

DataDrivenDee· Aug 2026 ago
genuinely curious how you'd separate "third trade is bad because i'm tilted" from "third trade is bad because the conditions that produced two stopouts are still there" — those two would look identical in your log, right? if you tagged each entry with something objective about the state of the market when you took it, you might be able to tell them apart, and the fix is pretty different depending on which one it is.
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NightOwl_Yuki· Aug 2026 ago
the walk thing is real. i trade nights mostly and my version is i just go make food, by the time i'm back the urge is gone. also there's basically no one to revenge trade against at 4am so that helps lol
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LurkerLee· Aug 2026 ago
does the two-strike counter reset if the two losses were the same idea expressed twice?
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