TRADING PSYCHOLOGY · DIAGNOSTICS
Trading leaks are recurring, measurable mistakes — oversizing, revenge entries, wrong time-of-day, holding losers — that quietly drain your account. You find them by running diagnostics over your full trade history, not by memory, because the mistakes that cost you the most are rarely the ones you remember.
Last updated: July 2026
DEFINITION
The term "leak" comes from poker, where it describes a specific, repeatable mistake in a player's decision-making that steadily costs money over a large enough sample — even though any single hand can look fine in isolation. Trading leaks work the same way.
A trading leak isn't a single bad trade. It's a pattern: the same kind of mistake, repeated across dozens of trades, that only becomes visible when you look at your history as a whole instead of one decision at a time.
THE MOST COMMON LEAKS
Position size creeps up after a loss (or a win), turning normal variance into outsized damage.
Entering the next trade to "get it back" instead of following your plan.
Taking more setups than your edge actually supports, often outside your best hours.
A specific session or hour where your win rate and R quietly underperform the rest of your day.
Stops widened or ignored, turning a small planned loss into a large unplanned one.
Exiting profitable trades before your plan's target, capping the upside your losers need to offset.
Entries, exits, or sizing that don't match your written plan — the leak most traders deny having.
WHY YOU CAN'T SPOT THIS YOURSELF
Memory is biased toward the dramatic, not the repeated. You remember the one huge loss that broke your day, not the twenty small ones that quietly added up to the same damage. Self-review scans for what stands out emotionally — a leak is defined by what repeats statistically.
That mismatch is why traders can review their own trades for months and still miss the single mistake costing them the most. Finding a leak requires looking at your full trade history as data, not reliving it as a story.
HOW FINOTAUR DOES IT
Once your broker is connected and your trades sync automatically, Finotaur's Leak Detector runs 7 diagnostic families over every trade in your history — the same families listed above — and returns a plain-language, dollar-denominated verdict for each one it finds:
"This cost you $X." Each leak is priced against your own trade history, so you know exactly which habit is worth fixing first.
Broker auto-sync, not memory. Every diagnostic runs against your real fills and positions — no manual logging, no guessing which trades to review.
NEXT STEP
FAQ
GET STARTED
Connect your broker and let the Leak Detector name your costliest mistake.