Overtrading
Overtrading is taking more trades than your plan asks for. It usually comes from boredom, from wanting the money back, or from mistaking activity for work.
In depth
Your plan produces four setups a week. You take fifteen. The extra eleven are the problem, whatever they cost. Say a round trip costs 8 dollars in fees and spread. Eleven extra trades a week is about 4,400 dollars a year. That is before any of them is right or wrong.
There is a second cost that is harder to see. A setup only has an edge under its own conditions. Take it somewhere else and you are flipping a coin with fees attached. Trade count is not the test. Whether each trade met your conditions is.
Why it matters
Overtrading also hides your results. If half your trades broke your rules, your win rate describes a mix of two different traders. You cannot tell whether the method failed or you did. So you change the method, which was working, and keep the habit, which was not.
Every fill imports from Schwab, IBKR or CSV, so the count comes from the broker. The calendar shows trades and P&L per day. Automatic tags mark scalps, late-session entries and fast re-entries after a loss. The By tag table shows what each group earns.
Frequently asked questions
There is no number. Compare what you took against what your plan called for. Three trades can be too many if none qualified.
Write the conditions down before the open. Cap the day's trade count, and stop at your daily loss limit.
Keep your Overtrading trades on the record in TraderLog
Trades import from Schwab and IBKR on their own, every day lands on a calendar with its P&L, and the day's entry sits beside it. Replay any trade on a TradingView chart. Free to start, no card.
Every trading morning at 8:40 ET our model draws the SPY, QQQ and IWM zones it expects to matter, on a TradingView chart, before the open. Where price reaches one, it has turned 74 percent of the time. Free, no account. See today's map