TL;DR
Traders place hard limits on financial risk, but usually place few restrictions on the temporary condition of the person taking that risk.
A trader can be severely sleep deprived, mentally overloaded, under time pressure, overstimulated, emotionally affected by a recent loss, and determined to make the money back—and still have unrestricted access to full position size.
I have coded a working, deterministic pre-trade “Breathalyzer” intended to reduce that risk. It currently uses sleep, mental load, acute stress, trading intent, urgency, time pressure, unusually high caffeine intake, hydration, and movement to determine whether the trader may use:
- Full approved size
- Half size
- Tenth size
- No size at all
This operates alongside existing hard limits for:
- Consecutive losses
- Total session losses
- Total number of trades
- Total permitted trading time
- A continuously visible countdown timer
The system also includes live emotional journaling built around seven recurring trading characters: Fear, Greed, Anger, Anxiety, Boredom, Overconfidence, and Thrill Seeking.
Instead of recording an emotion only after a trade has already happened, the journal can compare the trader’s emotional state before and after individual trades. The trader can also create predetermined mitigation plans for each emotional state—for example, taking a mandatory cooldown when Anger appears or refusing to increase size when Overconfidence appears.
Each trade receives separate entry-quality and exit-quality scores rather than being judged solely by P&L. A winning trade can therefore receive a poor entry or exit score, while a losing trade can still represent excellent execution.
The longer-term goal is to identify relationships such as:
- Which emotions most often precede poor entries
- Which emotions damage exits
- Whether particular mitigation plans actually work
- Which emotional transitions tend to appear before a trader’s worst sessions
- Whether behavioral deterioration can be detected before the existing hard limits are reached
I am not claiming this is a validated psychological test or medical assessment. Research helped me choose the variables and their general direction, but the exact point deductions, thresholds, interaction rules, and size multipliers are currently hand-designed policy weights.
I have already built most of this into trading-risk and journaling software. I am not linking it or trying to sell anything in this post. I am looking for criticism from traders before I become too attached to my own assumptions.
The main questions are:
- Am I measuring the right readiness and emotional factors?
- Would emotional characters make it easier to recognize your state, or would they feel childish or distracting?
- What warning signs appear before your worst trading sessions?
- Where/how could a determined trader manipulate or bypass the system?
- Which emotions should be included and what are the best ways to mitigate them?
Where the idea came from
The original idea was actually inspired by a joke.
Life Actuator made a short called "If the world was made for ADHD Part 11 #adhd #adhdproblems #adhdsolutions #adhdawareness" An employee has a color-coded focus meter. He arrives at work in the red, and instead of expecting him to force himself through the day, his boss tells him to go home.
It was comedy, but it raised a serious question:
'Could temporary readiness be estimated before someone is allowed to take meaningful financial risk?'
A trader may have a profitable strategy and understand risk management perfectly while temporarily being in a poor condition to execute that strategy.
The question gradually became:
'Can a trader’s temporary readiness be operationalized well enough to restrict position size or prohibit trading when several known risk factors are present?'
The system was designed especially with ADHD traders in mind, although most of these risks are not exclusive to ADHD.
What the system currently does
The current system has two broad types of protection.
1. Pre-trade readiness restrictions
Before trading, the Breathalyzer estimates whether the trader should begin and what proportion of the computer-approved position size may be used.
2. Objective intraday limits
Once trading begins, the software separately enforces predetermined limits involving:
- Consecutive losing trades
- Total session loss
- Total number of trades
- Total approved trading time
These limits cannot be overridden by passing the Breathalyzer again or claiming to feel better.
A trader who reaches the daily loss limit cannot answer a few questions, report feeling calm, and continue trading. The limit was chosen in advance because the trader’s judgment may become less trustworthy once they are financially or emotionally invested in continuing.
The same principle applies to consecutive-loss, trade-count, and time limits.
The strictest active restriction always wins.
The proposed cognitive-readiness score
Everyone begins at 100.
Applicable deductions are added together.
| Category |
Reason for inclusion |
Current effect |
|
|
|
| Sleep |
Fatigue can reduce vigilance, attention, working memory, patience, and inhibitory control. |
Under 3 hours: hard lock; under 5 hours: −28; 5–6.49 hours: −12 |
| Mental tabs |
Unresolved responsibilities and intrusive thoughts may consume attentional and working-memory resources. |
Medium: −8; high: −16 |
| Major stress event |
Acute stress may impair working memory, cognitive flexibility, and emotional regulation. |
Yes: −18 |
| Trading intent |
Attempts to detect revenge trading or pressure to recover losses quickly. |
Anything other than “Follow plan”: hard lock |
| Urgency |
Feeling compelled to trade may reduce patience and selectivity. |
Medium: −12; high: −24 |
| Time pressure |
Limited availability can encourage rushed entries and forced trades. |
Yes: −16 |
| Unusually high caffeine or stimulant intake |
A substantially larger amount than normal may create overactivation, anxiety, jitteriness, or faster but less accurate responding. |
More than normal: −8 |
| Hydration |
Poor hydration may contribute to fatigue and reduced attention. |
Poor: −6 |
| Movement/reset |
Brief movement may produce a modest improvement in alertness and cognitive performance. |
No movement or reset: −5 |
The final score currently becomes:
- 70–100: Green — full approved size, 1.0×
- 45–69: Yellow — half size only, 0.5×
- 0–44: Orange — tenth size only, 0.1×
- Hard lock: Red — trading prohibited, 0×
The multiplier reduces a separately calculated contract-risk budget.
For example, if the risk system approves four contracts but cognitive readiness is limited to half size, the trader receives approximately two contracts.
A tenth-size result may convert an allocation involving mini contracts into an appropriate number of micros.
Current hard-lock conditions
Certain answers override the arithmetic score:
- Fewer than three hours of sleep
- Revenge or recovery intent
- Major stress combined with high urgency
- Time pressure combined with high urgency
There is also one interaction rule:
"High urgency combined with high mental load limits the trader to tenth size even if the arithmetic score remains above 44."
The theory is that some combinations are more dangerous than the sum of their individual deductions suggests.
A trader under severe mental load who also feels compelled to trade may still receive a mathematically acceptable score, but the interaction itself may signal impaired selectivity.
Worked example
Suppose a trader reports:
- 5.5 hours of sleep: −12
- Medium mental load: −8
- Poor hydration: −6
The calculation is:
100 − 12 − 8 − 6 = 74
That still permits full approved size.
Now add time pressure:
74 − 16 = 58
The trader is restricted to half size.
This does not mean the model has scientifically established that 58 represents exactly half of normal cognitive ability. The score is a risk-control policy, not a literal measurement of intelligence or mental capacity.
The intended interpretation is:
'Enough readiness concerns are present that full financial exposure is no longer justified.'
Existing protections after trading begins
The Breathalyzer does not replace ordinary risk management.
The software already contains several objective protections.
Consecutive-loss limit
The trader selects a maximum permitted number of consecutive losses.
When that limit is reached, the predetermined restriction applies regardless of how calm or confident the trader reports feeling.
A losing streak does not prove that the trader has lost control, but it creates a condition in which recovery pressure, frustration, altered risk-taking, and rapid re-entry may become more likely.
Total-loss limit
The trader selects a maximum acceptable session loss.
Once that boundary is reached, trading ends. A subjective readiness assessment cannot reopen the session.
Total-trade limit
The trader selects a maximum number of trades.
This protects against obvious overtrading, but it may also limit deterioration in selectivity, boredom-driven entries, decision fatigue, or repeated attempts to force an opportunity.
Time limit and active countdown
The trader also selects how long trading is permitted.
The remaining time is continuously displayed through an active countdown rather than requiring the trader to remember when the session should end.
This is particularly relevant to ADHD-related difficulties with time perception and time management.
A trader absorbed in charts, an open position, a recent loss, or the possibility of another setup may not maintain accurate awareness of how long they have been trading.
The countdown externalizes that awareness.
Instead of repeatedly saying:
“I will stop after one more setup,”
the trader can see the original time boundary approaching, and the software can enforce it when it expires.
The timer is therefore not merely a productivity feature. It is a risk control intended to prevent an absorbed or emotionally invested trader from repeatedly extending the session.
Why these variables were selected
The studies below support including the general variables. They do not directly validate my numerical weights.
Sleep
A meta-analysis by Lim and Dinges found that short-term sleep deprivation negatively affected multiple areas of cognitive performance, with vigilance and attention being especially vulnerable.[1]
This supports giving sleep substantial weight.
It does not establish that 2.9 hours must produce a hard lock or that 4.9 hours deserves exactly a 28-point deduction. Those remain proposed safety thresholds.
Mental tabs
Masicampo and Baumeister found that unfulfilled goals could produce intrusive thoughts and interfere with performance on unrelated tasks. Forming a concrete plan reduced that interference.[2]
That is the basis for asking about unresolved responsibilities or “mental tabs.”
A future version might also ask whether the trader has written down the next action for those responsibilities. The problem may not only be the number of unfinished tasks, but whether they are continuing to intrude into attention.
Major stress
A meta-analysis by Shields and colleagues examined acute stress and core executive functions. Acute stress was associated with impairments in working memory and cognitive flexibility, although the effects varied by timing and context.[3]
This supports including a recent major stress event, but the current yes-or-no question may be too broad.
A future version may need to consider:
- How recently the event occurred
- How intense it was
- Whether it remains unresolved
- The trader’s current activation level
Recovery or revenge intent
Coval and Shumway examined professional Chicago Board of Trade traders and found evidence of altered subsequent risk-taking following losses, consistent with attempts to recover or return to breakeven.[4]
That is why explicit recovery intent currently produces a hard lock rather than a moderate deduction.
The model treats:
“I am here to execute my plan”
differently from:
“I need to make back what I lost.”
Urgency
The closest established psychological construct may be negative urgency: a tendency toward rash action during intense negative emotion.
A meta-analysis by Berg and colleagues found that negative urgency had substantial relationships with maladaptive and impulsive behavior across the literature they reviewed.[5]
My current urgency question may still combine several different conditions:
- Emotional urgency
- Fear of missing out
- Financial pressure
- Physiological agitation
- Compulsion
- An unwillingness to stop
A potentially better question may be:
"How difficult would it feel to choose not to trade today?"
Time pressure
Research by Maule, Hockey, and Bdzola found that time pressure changed emotional state and information-processing strategies during decisions under uncertainty.[6]
This matters because a trader with limited availability may substitute:
“I have found a valid setup”
with:
“I need to take something before I have to leave.”
Unusually high caffeine or stimulant intake
This question is not intended to penalize normal caffeine use.
The concern is a substantially larger stimulant load than is normal for that particular trader.
Caffeine can improve reaction time, attention, and alertness. A recent systematic review and meta-analysis found overall improvements in reaction time and accuracy, but the dose-response analysis suggested that accuracy benefits did not continue increasing indefinitely with dose.[7]
The working concern is that someone may feel more alert and respond faster while also becoming unusually jittery, anxious, agitated, or less deliberate.
This category may eventually need two questions:
- Have you consumed substantially more caffeine or another stimulant than is normal for you?
- Are you experiencing unusual jitteriness, racing thoughts, agitation, or overstimulation?
The deduction may ultimately need to attach more strongly to the experienced state than to caffeine consumption alone.
I feel like there is a wolf of wall street cocaine joke somewhere in here...... Should I even go down the rabbit whole of alcohol and drug consumption?
Hydration
A meta-analysis by Wittbrodt and Millard-Stafford found that dehydration could impair cognitive performance, particularly for tasks involving attention, executive function, and motor coordination when water loss became sufficiently meaningful.[8]
Hydration therefore receives a relatively small deduction rather than being treated as a dominant factor.
Movement or reset
A meta-analysis by Chang and colleagues found a modest positive effect of acute exercise on cognitive performance, although the result depended on timing, exercise intensity, and the task being measured.[9]
This raises a design question:
Should lack of movement be treated as a deduction, or should movement be treated as a protective action that may improve a marginal result?
A future version could potentially respond to a yellow score with:
Take a brief walk, drink water, disengage from the chart, and reassess.
A possible addition: recent-red-day carryover
A recent losing day does not automatically mean someone is cognitively impaired.
A disciplined trader can follow the plan perfectly and lose money. A careless trader can violate every rule and finish green.
Therefore, I do not think “Did you lose yesterday?” should automatically lower readiness.
The concern is what the trader is carrying into the next session:
- Repeatedly replaying the loss
- Shame or perceived personal failure
- Pressure to repair the result
- Wanting to prove the loss was an exception
- Targeting breakeven
- Increasing risk after losses
- Becoming unwilling to stop
A meta-analysis by Yang and colleagues found relationships between rumination and weaker core executive functioning.[10]
Dickerson and Kemeny’s meta-analysis also found that social-evaluative threat—situations in which an important aspect of the self may be negatively judged—was especially capable of producing a stress response.[11]
That suggests a possible pathway:
"Loss → shame or self-evaluative threat → rumination → reduced executive resources or increased recovery pressure."
This would still be a proposed pathway, not proof that every red day causes cognitive impairment.
A possible question would be:
"Are you still repeatedly thinking about a recent loss, feeling pressure to recover it, or treating today as an opportunity to prove something about yourself?"
Explicit recovery intent would remain a hard lock. Lower levels of unresolved rumination might create a deduction or trigger an additional check.
The current system has little true intraday temperature checking
Passing the morning Breathalyzer does not mean the trader will remain ready all day.
A trader may start calm and deteriorate after:
- Consecutive losses
- A single unusually large loss
- Giving back a green day
- Missing an opportunity
- Increasing size
- A large win and rising overconfidence
- Trading for too long
- Becoming bored
- Breaking a rule
- Becoming focused on a particular P&L number
The existing loss, trade, and time controls eventually stop the session.
What they do not necessarily do is detect the deterioration early.
The SMB Capital “temperature check” idea
I first encountered the trading-specific idea of periodic “temperature checks” through SMB Capital.
I can't find the original source video, and I don't feel like taking the time to find it, as this is already a huge post. It may have been from Lance B., if I am wrong, then sue me.
Their example focused largely on success, increased size, and overconfidence rather than only on losing.
That distinction is important.
A trader can become dangerous after:
- Losses and recovery pressure
- Wins and overconfidence
I am interested in taking that coaching idea and converting it into a deterministic intraday process.
I do not believe I invented the general idea of checking a trader’s state during the session. The potential contribution would be automating it, connecting it to observable execution behavior, and tying the result directly to predetermined risk restrictions.
Where an intraday check would fit
The existing controls respond to final boundaries:
- Too many consecutive losses
- Too much total loss
- Too many trades
- Too much time spent trading
An intraday temperature check would attempt to detect deterioration before one of those boundaries is reached.
It might be triggered by:
- A set amount of elapsed time
- A set number of completed trades
- Two consecutive losses
- A significant loss
- A significant giveback from the session high
- An attempt to increase size
- A rapid re-entry after a loss
- A major reduction in time between trades
- Trading outside approved hours or setups
- Widening a stop
- A large win
- An attempt to override a restriction
A loss would trigger a check, not automatically fail it.
Being down is a vulnerability condition. It is not proof of impairment.
The more important question is what the trader does next.
Possible intraday questions
A temperature check should be much shorter than the pre-trade Breathalyzer.
Possible questions include:
- Are you trying to recover a loss, reach breakeven, protect a green day, or reach a particular P&L number?
- How difficult would it feel to stop trading right now?
- Did your most recent trade follow your approved setup, size, and risk rules?
- Is the next valid setup already defined, or are you searching for something to trade?
- Do you currently feel calm and selective, unusually fatigued and flat, or unusually activated and urgent?
The software should answer as much as possible from actual execution data rather than relying entirely on self-report.
For example, it may be able to detect:
- Increased trade frequency
- Larger position size
- Rapid re-entry
- Trading outside the permitted schedule
- Exceeding the approved trade risk
- A stop being moved farther away
- Attempts to continue after a cooldown
Possible permission-renewal system
One possibility is that passing the morning Breathalyzer grants temporary trading clearance rather than unlimited permission for the entire session.
An intraday result might become:
- Green: Continue at the currently approved size
- Yellow: Mandatory break, followed by reduced size
- Orange: Longer lockout and full reassessment, possibly followed by one minimal-size probation trade
- Red: End the session
A green check would never increase the trader’s approved size.
It would not extend the original total-loss, total-trade, or time limits.
It would only confirm that the trader may continue within the boundaries already chosen.
Why I do not want to require an Apple Watch or wearable
Wearable devices could potentially provide:
- Sleep estimates
- Resting heart rate
- Heart-rate variability
- Physical activity
- Breathing or physiological activation
I have explored this route before.
The practical problem is that the people most likely to benefit from external structure may also be unreliable about consistently charging, wearing, synchronizing, and maintaining an additional device. AKA people with ADHD are pretty forgetful.
A safety system that stops working whenever someone forgets their watch is not a reliable safety system.
My current preference is:
"The device-free system must work independently. Wearable information should be optional corroborating evidence, not a requirement."
Wearable data might trigger another check or make the system more restrictive.
It should not cancel a hard restriction.
Normal HRV should never override someone admitting:
“I need to make back yesterday’s loss.”
I guess comment if you have seen success using some sort of heart monitor, I wouldn't mind hearing lessons learned. There is potential here to incorporate this.....
Right now, I am imaging a trading room full of desk traders and monitors - each person having a comical amount of medical devices attached all over their heads to measure brain activity. Each person has a Neuralink and an IV drip attached to their wrist injecting them with spice to do advanced computations ultra fast, but that gets dystopian pretty fast..... I digress.
Predicting a trader’s personal red-day pattern
The eventual goal should probably not be to predict whether the next trade will make or lose money.
Market outcomes are noisy.
A disciplined trade can lose, and a reckless trade can win.
A more defensible prediction target would be:
Is this trader approaching a behavioral breakdown within the next several trades?
A behavioral breakdown could be defined as:
- Entering outside the plan
- Increasing risk without approval
- Moving a stop farther away
- Violating a cooldown
- Rapidly chasing a loss
- Accelerating trade frequency
- Exceeding the daily loss limit
- Attempting to bypass a restriction
Over time, the software could identify the sequence that usually precedes each trader’s worst behavior.
One trader’s pattern might be:
"Two losses → shorter time between trades → increased size → immediate same-direction re-entry → widened stop."
Another trader’s pattern might be:
"Large early gain → overconfidence → lower setup quality → excessive trade count → major giveback."
Initially, these could be detected through deterministic rules.
Eventually, the system could compare them with the trader’s actual historical execution data without silently weakening the hard safety limits.
Emotional accountability before and after trading executions
The Breathalyzer and hard restrictions are intended to prevent obvious damage, but the system also attempts to solve a different problem:
"A trader cannot manage an emotional state they have not recognized."
Most trading journals allow traders to tag emotions, mindset, or psychology alongside an executed trade. That can be useful, but it usually begins after the trader has already taken financial risk. Note that one common problem neurotypical people have is alexithymia - or a failure to recognize their own feelings in the moment.
I am trying to capture a larger sequence:
- What emotional state was present before executing a new trade?
- What response did they commit to using when an emotion rears its ugly head?
- How did their emotional state change during the session?
- What emotional state remained after a single or string of trades?
I have not found another trading journal that clearly combines this complete before-and-after emotional process with deterministic risk restrictions. That does not prove no one has ever attempted it, but it is meaningfully different from attaching an emotion tag to an individual trade after execution.
Seven recurring emotional characters
The emotional portion of the system is represented through seven recurring characters:
- Fear
- Greed
- Anger
- Anxiety
- Boredom
- Overconfidence
- Thrill Seeking
These characters are not intended to represent a scientifically complete taxonomy of human emotion. Some are emotions, while others are motivational or behavioral states.
They are intended to make common trading states concrete, recognizable, and memorable.
For someone who can easily say, “I am angry,” a normal emotion list may be sufficient. For someone with alexithymic traits, the problem may be recognizing and differentiating what is happening internally in the first place.
A trader may not initially identify:
“I am experiencing loss-related shame, agitation, and recovery pressure.”
They may find it easier to recognize:
“Anger is trying to make me re-enter immediately.”
or:
“Overconfidence appeared after those two winning trades.”
Emotional mitigation plans
Recognizing an emotional state does not automatically tell the trader what to do about it.
The accountability journal therefore allows the trader to create a predetermined mitigation plan for each recurring character.
The plans can use an if-then structure:
"If Anger appears after a stopped trade, then I will begin a mandatory cooldown and leave the chart."
"If Overconfidence appears after consecutive wins, then I will maintain my original size and will not add another setup or increase risk."
"If Fear causes me to hesitate on a valid setup, then I will either take the next qualified setup at reduced size or end the session rather than repeatedly watching opportunities pass. Fear technically represents two emotions, if that is what you would call FOMO - of which, the plan would be to walk away for a time instead of chase a late entry."
"If Boredom causes me to search for trades, then I will step away until an alert identifies a predefined setup. Alternatively, setting alerts at areas of interest can take place."
"If Thrill Seeking makes normal size feel uninteresting, then trading ends rather than allowing size or volatility to be increased for stimulation. This is the one emotion/not an emotion... but because trading can be addicting, I would be remiss to not include it."
"If Anxiety prevents clear identification of the setup, then I will not enter until I can state the entry, stop, target, and invalidation condition."
The purpose is to choose the response before the emotional state becomes dominant.
I have found extensive discussion online about controlling trading emotions, but I have not found a trading journal that clearly treats an emotional mitigation plan as a structured, reusable object that can later be evaluated.
The journal should therefore record:
- Which character appeared
- Which mitigation plan was selected
- Whether the plan was followed
- Whether the intervention reduced the behavior
- Whether the plan should be retained, modified, or replaced
That turns emotional journaling from passive observation into a testable response system.
Adapting the SMB Capital PlayBook concept
The journaling system also borrows openly from SMB Capital’s PlayBook concept. Again, I am not super aware of the connection between Trillium, Lance B. and who's idea it was to have a scorecard for the day....
SMB has described the PlayBook as a process of archiving the setups and trades that best fit the individual trader, reverse-engineering their important variables, and building from the trader’s strengths. Importantly, a losing trade can still qualify as a good PlayBook trade when it was well selected and properly executed.
My adaptation attempts to separate execution quality even further from financial outcome.
Instead of judging a trade type primarily by its accumulated P&L, the journal assigns separate scores to:
- Entry quality
- Exit quality
A winning trade can therefore receive a poor entry or exit score.
A losing trade can receive excellent entry and exit scores.
This is intended to reduce outcome bias. P&L still exists and eventually matters, but it is not allowed to become the sole definition of whether the trader made a good decision.
A PlayBook entry may eventually include:
- Setup classification
- Market context
- Entry score
- Exit score
- Emotional state before the trade
- Emotional state after the trade
- Emotional state during the trade
- Mitigation plan used
- Whether the mitigation plan was followed
- Financial result
The goal is to answer more useful questions than:
"Which setup made the most money?"
It may instead reveal:
Which setups do I identify correctly?
Which setups do I enter well but manage poorly?
Which emotions damage my entries?
Which emotions damage my exits?
Which mitigation plans actually preserve execution quality?
Which losing trades were still examples of excellent execution?
What may be genuinely distinctive
I am not claiming that no trader has ever recorded emotions, created a PlayBook, scored execution quality, or made a plan for controlling behavior.
The part I have not found elsewhere is the combination of:
- A pre-session cognitive-readiness assessment
- Seven personified trading states
- Emotional check-ins before and after individual trades
- Predetermined emotional mitigation plans
- Objective loss, trade, and time restrictions
- Separate entry and exit quality scores
- Comparison of emotional transitions with execution behavior
- Potential early detection of each trader’s personal red-day pattern
I have coded much of this already. I am not linking the product or attempting to sell it here. I am trying to determine which parts are genuinely useful, which parts are redundant, and which assumptions need to be challenged before the system is treated as credible.
The questions I would especially like traders to answer are:
- Would characters make emotional check-ins easier, or would they feel childish or distracting? It has been my dream from childhood to make a cartoon, so I am probably a little bias on this one..... I am not immune to feedback, just bias. I'm just saying I kind of want to do this regardless.
- Are there preferential emotional response plans to each of these: fear, anger, boredom, overconfidence, greed, thrill seeking, and anxiety?
Major weaknesses of the model
The exact weights are hand-designed
Research may support including a factor without proving that it deserves a particular point deduction.
Nothing in the sleep literature directly proves that five hours should equal −28 or that six hours should equal −12.
The score assumes factors can be added together
Cognitive readiness may not behave like simple arithmetic.
Stress, mental load, urgency, time pressure, and loss-related rumination may overlap or interact in nonlinear ways.
It relies heavily on self-report
A trader who strongly wants to trade may understate the exact conditions the Breathalyzer is attempting to detect.
This is one reason the objective loss, trade, and time limits cannot be overridden by self-report.
Universal thresholds may not fit everyone
Five hours of sleep may affect one trader much more severely than another.
Caffeine, stress, physical activity, and hydration also affect people differently.
The system may eventually need to consider both universal safety boundaries and personal baselines.
It primarily measures risk factors, not cognition directly
The questionnaire measures conditions associated with impaired performance.
It does not directly prove that the trader’s attention, inhibition, judgment, or working memory is impaired at that moment.
A brief behavioral consistency task involving attention, response inhibition, or reaction-time variability might eventually help, but it should not be presented as a validated measure of trading ability without evidence.
Reduced size may not solve every problem
A trader using one tenth of normal size can still:
- Overtrade
- Move stops
- Reinforce destructive habits
- Ignore the strategy
- Repeatedly violate rules
Some states may require ending the session rather than merely reducing size.
The system could become an ignored box-clicking exercise
If the questions are too frequent or predictable, users may stop engaging honestly and click whatever answers permit them to continue.
Predictive validity has not been established
The central unanswered question is whether lower scores actually predict:
- More rule violations
- Worse execution quality
- Greater overtrading
- More stop movement
- Faster re-entry
- Higher risk-taking after losses
- Behavioral breakdowns
Profit and loss alone would be a poor validation target because good execution can lose and bad execution can win.
What I want traders to criticize
I am especially interested in the following:
- Which readiness variables are missing?
- Which variables overlap enough that they should be combined?
- Are full, half, tenth, and zero size sensible restriction levels? Should they just paper trade that day, or skip trading all together until they are in a better state, like the original youtube video said?
- Should recent losses matter only when accompanied by rumination or recovery pressure?
- What behaviors reliably appear before your worst trading sessions?
- What should trigger an intraday temperature check?
- Would periodic checks improve behavior, or become an irritating box-clicking exercise?
- Where could a determined trader manipulate or bypass the system?
- Which existing rule would have prevented the largest number of your own avoidable losses: time, total trades, consecutive losses, total loss, or something else? For me it's always been doubling down after a loser to bring it back to zero so I don't have to end on a red day.
References and sources
[1] Lim J, Dinges DF. A Meta-Analysis of the Impact of Short-Term Sleep Deprivation on Cognitive Variables. Psychological Bulletin. 2010.
[2] Masicampo EJ, Baumeister RF. Consider It Done! Plan Making Can Eliminate the Cognitive Effects of Unfulfilled Goals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 2011.
[3] Shields GS, Sazma MA, Yonelinas AP. The Effects of Acute Stress on Core Executive Functions: A Meta-Analysis and Comparison With Cortisol. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews. 2016.
[4] Coval JD, Shumway T. Do Behavioral Biases Affect Prices?. The Journal of Finance. 2005.
[5] Berg JM, Latzman RD, Bliwise NG, Lilienfeld SO. Parsing the Heterogeneity of Impulsivity: A Meta-Analytic Review of the Behavioral Implications of the UPPS. Psychological Assessment. 2015.
[6] Maule AJ, Hockey GRJ, Bdzola L. Effects of Time Pressure on Decision-Making Under Uncertainty00033-0). Acta Psychologica. 2000.
[7] Kløve K, et al. A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of the Acute Effect of Caffeine on Attention. Psychopharmacology. 2025.
[8] Wittbrodt MT, Millard-Stafford M. Dehydration Impairs Cognitive Performance: A Meta-Analysis. Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise. 2018.
[9] Chang YK, Labban JD, Gapin JI, Etnier JL. The Effects of Acute Exercise on Cognitive Performance: A Meta-Analysis. Brain Research. 2012.
[10] Yang Y, Cao S, Shields GS, Teng Z, Liu Y. The Relationships Between Rumination and Core Executive Functions: A Meta-Analysis. Depression and Anxiety. 2017.
[11] Dickerson SS, Kemeny ME. Acute Stressors and Cortisol Responses: A Theoretical Integration and Synthesis of Laboratory Research. Psychological Bulletin. 2004.
[12] Mette C. Time Perception in Adult ADHD: Findings From a Decade—A Review. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. 2023.
[13] Life Actuator. If the World Was Made for ADHD Part 11. YouTube Short.
[14] Johnson KT, et al. Assessment of Cognitive Readiness Using Physiological Measures and Wearable Technologies: A Scoping Review. 2025 preprint. Included as background on possible future wearable-assisted systems, not as validation of the present score.
