Your tradebook is the most honest document you own. It is also the one you least want to open.
SEBI's FY24 study found that about 91% of individual F&O traders lost money. Read enough of those tradebooks and a pattern shows up that has nothing to do with charts: the losses don't come from being wrong about the market. They come from a small set of behaviours that repeat, trade after trade, while nobody is counting.
The useful part is that each of these leaves a specific, countable signal in your own data. You don't need a psychologist to find them — you need your tradebook and a way to read it. Here are the six that show up most often.
1. Revenge trading — the sized-up re-entry after a loss
You take a loss. Within a few minutes you're back in, but bigger. Not because a setup appeared — because you want the money back.
The signal in your data: a trade opened shortly after a losing trade's exit, at noticeably more than your usual size. One loss followed by a 2× position is not a coincidence; it's a pattern. If you want the full picture on how common this is in Indian tradebooks, we pulled it apart in what the data reveals about revenge trading.
2. The tilt spiral — rapid-fire after back-to-back losses
Two losses in a row and something shifts. The gaps between trades collapse. You stop waiting for the setup and start reacting. This is the cluster that turns a bad hour into a bad month.
The signal in your data: three or more trades packed into a short window — often under an hour — right after a couple of consecutive losses. Look at the timestamps, not the P&L. Tilt is a timing problem before it's a money problem.
3. Impulse entries — no gap between one trade and the next
You square off one position and, seconds later, you're in a completely different instrument. There was no plan for the second trade. The first one just left you needing to be in something.
The signal in your data: an entry that lands within a minute or two of your previous exit, on a different underlying. A disciplined trader leaves a gap. An impulsive one treats the market like a slot machine.
4. Overtrading — trading past your own baseline
Your edge lives in a handful of setups. On a normal day you might take three or four trades. Then there are the days the terminal shows fourteen. Every extra trade past your real edge is, on average, a drag on the ones that actually work.
The signal in your data: count your trades per day over a few weeks and find your normal. The overtraded days stick out — and they usually cluster with the losses. We wrote a whole piece on how to stop overtrading using your own numbers, because "just trade less" is useless advice without a number attached.
5. Holding losers, cutting winners — loss aversion
This one is quiet, which is why it's dangerous. You close winners quickly to lock in the good feeling, and you hold losers far too long, hoping they come back. It feels prudent in the moment. Over a year it inverts your risk-reward.
The signal in your data: compare how long you hold winners versus losers. If your average losing trade sits open far longer than your average winner, loss aversion is running your exits — not your plan.
6. Expiry-day oversizing — the Thursday gamble
Weekly expiry has a way of switching off the risk brain. Premiums are cheap, the move looks obvious, and the position size creeps up to a multiple of what you'd take on any other day.
The signal in your data: filter to your expiry-day trades and check the sizing. If your position size on expiry is consistently larger than your baseline, that's not conviction — that's the day of the week making the decision for you.
You don't have to count all this by hand
Everything above is measurable. It is also tedious to measure — nobody is going to sit with a spreadsheet after a losing session and compute their median hold time.
That's the whole reason we built TradeDNA. Upload your broker file and it reads these six patterns straight out of your tradebook — the revenge re-entries, the tilt clusters, the overtraded days — and shows you what each habit cost you. No manual tagging, no diary to keep up. You confirm the ones that ring true and dismiss the rest. It works with Zerodha, Upstox, Dhan, Groww, Fyers and Angel One, and you can see the full feature list here.
The point of looking back
None of this predicts your next trade, and it isn't meant to. It's a read of what you already did — which is the only thing you can actually change. The traders who climb out of the losing 90% rarely do it by finding a better setup. They do it by leaking less through the same six holes, week after week, until the leaks close.
Your tradebook already knows which ones are yours. The only question is whether you're willing to read it. If you want a framework for turning that read into a number you can track, start with your F&O Discipline Score.
TradeDNA is post-trade behavioural analytics software for Indian retail traders. It analyses trades you have already made. It does not provide buy/sell signals, price targets, or investment advice of any kind.