You take the next trade to win back the last one

The losing trade is closed. The amount is sitting on the screen with a minus in front of it. It is a number, not a feeling, and a number looks like something you can get back. The next order goes in inside a minute. It is usually bigger, it is often in the same contract, and if you think back to what you were looking for when you placed it, it was not the chart. It was the number you wanted back.

Why the next trade is a different kind of trade

Your account holds one figure, the amount that is gone. You are holding a second one that is not in the account at all: what the next trade would have to do to cancel it. That one is larger, because the next trade carries its own charges too.

Getting back to level in one trade means the next trade has to produce at least as much rupee movement as the last one took away, plus the charges on both. That can come from more size, from a longer move, or from both. Size is the only one of the three you control, which is why size is usually what goes up. Nothing you saw on a chart picked it. That is the part worth noticing.

There is a deadline in it as well, and it is one you invented. The close is a deadline in your head. The market does not know you want to be level by then. So everything gets faster. Less time choosing. Less time between one trade and the next. More willing to take whatever is there instead of what you were waiting for.

The contract is often the same one too, not because it is the best thing available, but because that is where the money went, and it feels like that is where it has to come back from.

• The shortest gap between any two orders in your whole month sits right after a loss.
• The position was larger than the one before it, and you had not planned that before the day began.
• You remember the amount you were down more clearly than you remember the trade itself.
• You stopped when you got back to level, which is a stopping point your own plan never mentioned.
• It was in the same contract that had just taken the money.
• You could not say now what you saw in it. There was nothing to see.

Counting it from your own order history

This one is mostly the clock. Export a month of trades with their timestamps. Count only the exits that left you with nothing open, and skip any position you closed one leg at a time. Pair each entry with its exit to get the profit or loss on that position, then measure the minutes from that flat point to your next entry.

Put each gap in one of two columns: the position before it was profitable, or it was not. Average each column. Two averages, two numbers. If they are far apart, you will see it without any interpretation. If they are close, that is an answer too. Then do the same with quantity instead of time. Average lots after a profitable exit, average lots after a losing one. Two subtractions and you have it.