Overtrading is the behavioural pattern of taking too many positions in a session, often beyond what the market's setup-density actually warrants. The trader is bored, restless, or feels they 'need to stay active'. Setup quality drops; the equity curve quietly bleeds on those days.
The detector reads two signals from the trade history:
- Pace signal — group all closed trades by day, compute the trader's own median trades-per-day, and flag days where the count crossed a multiplier of that pace. The user's OWN baseline is the comparison, not a global one — a scalper with 10 trades/day and a swing trader with 1 trade/day each have their own definition of 'overtrading'.
- P&L direction guard — flagged days must additionally have aggregate net P&L MATERIALLY WORSE than normal-pace days. A high-count day that happened to be more profitable was a busy market the trader caught, not behavioural overtrading. The card stays silent in that case.
Both signals must fire for the card to emit. This avoids slandering a productive scalping day with a 'you traded too much' label when the trader actually performed well.
20 active trading days. Median pace: 2 trades/day. 4 of those days closed with 5+ trades each (well above pace) AND those 4 days each ended with negative net P&L while normal-pace days averaged a positive return.
Severity bands on the overtrading rate: - Mild — occasional overtrading on a slow week. Note in the journal; one bad week per month is human. - Moderate — established pattern. About one in four active days is over-pace AND money-losing. The fix is a daily trade-cap rule. - Severe — dominant mode. The trader's elevated pace IS the new normal — and it's the bleeding edge. Stop new entries until the rate falls back materially or paper-trade until it does.
The Onyx-Engine assigns the rate to one of these bands; the cutoff thresholds are TradeOnyx-internal calibration.
Why the P&L direction guard matters. A pure-count detector would slander a productive scalping day. The market sometimes really does offer 8 setups when 2 is the norm — those days are not the problem. The detector requires the high-count days to also be MATERIALLY WORSE than normal days; only then is the pattern genuinely behavioural.
The fix is mechanical. Daily trade-cap: a number above which today's session ends regardless of opportunity. Most users find their own median plus 50 % is the right ceiling — restrictive enough to break the bored-clicking habit, generous enough to ride genuinely-active markets. Pair the cap with the Discipline-Scorecard's plan-adherence axis so each day's count vs cap shows up in the weekly review.
Tier: Pro. Behavioural-discipline axis. Often co-fires with Revenge-Trading (TRA-219) — same root state (restless / FOMO / chasing), two different symptoms.
How to read the card:
1. Hero (left) — overtrading rate as a percentage with a severity verdict. 2. Two MicroStats — Your usual pace (median trades/day) and Normal-day P&L (the baseline aggregate per typical day). 3. Cost callout (red box) — the avg P&L on overtrading days side-by-side with the per-day suffix. The number should be jarring; that's the point. 4. Hint line — actionable: the daily trade-cap rule.
Re-look frequency: weekly. Daily fluctuations are noise; the pattern stabilises after ~3-4 weeks of trading.
Tier: Pro.