You get in after the move has already happened

You have been watching it for twenty minutes with no position on. It has gone the way you thought it would go, which is the part that stings, and it is still going. The order goes in because the one thing you are sure of is that you do not want to sit and watch the rest of this happen to other people. By the time the fill comes back, most of the move is behind you. You knew that when you clicked.

Why the late entry feels like the safer one

Sitting flat while something moves is uncomfortable while it is happening. Getting in late is not uncomfortable at the time at all. So you do the thing that stops the discomfort now.

And the move itself feels like proof. Before it started, your read was a guess. Now the market has agreed with you. So getting in now feels safer than getting in earlier would have. If the level you had in mind sits where the move began, then entering later puts that same level further from your entry than it was when you first looked. That part is subtraction, and you can measure it on your own chart. How much of the move is left is not something anyone can subtract, so this page does not claim to know.

The third reason is the simplest: getting in late does not feel like a decision at all. There is nothing to remember deciding, which is why these are easy to undercount when you go from memory instead of from the record. What it looks like in your own trades:

• You opened that chart today because it was already moving, not before.
• The order was a market order. You wanted it done rather than done at a price.
• You cannot say what you had been waiting for, because you were not waiting for anything in particular. You were just waiting.
• The reason you would give for the trade is a description of the move, not of anything you saw before the move.
• Your entry times cluster in one stretch of the clock rather than spreading across the session.
• You were flat and uncomfortable, and that is the part of it you remember most clearly.

Counting it from your own order history

Two counts. The first needs nothing but your order book. Tally your last twenty entries three ways: market, limit, and trigger orders. The three should add up to twenty. A market order is just an order type. What the tally shows is how many of your entries went in as market orders. If your trade report does not carry the order type for past days, start the tally from today's order book and run it forward.

The second takes ten minutes with your own charts. Go through your last ten trades one at a time, mark your entry time on that day's chart, and answer one question with a yes or a no. Had the move already happened when I got in? Do not grade it, do not score it, just write yes or no and total the yeses. Then look at where the yeses sit on the clock. If most of them land in the same stretch of the session, you have learned something about an hour of your day, which is a more useful thing to know than anything about yourself.