Overtrading
Overtrading is taking more trades, or larger ones, than your plan justifies — trading for activity, stimulation, or recovery rather than because a defined setup appeared.
It has recognizable signatures: entries with no written setup behind them, frequency that rises after both wins and losses, position size drifting upward, and sessions that continue past the point the plan said to stop. Each extra trade also pays the spread, so cost scales with the habit — fifteen unplanned one-lot trades at a 0.8-pip spread is about $120 of pure drag in a day.
The reliable countermeasures are structural rather than motivational: a fixed daily trade budget, a checklist every trade must pass, and a journal that tags each entry as planned or unplanned so the pattern has a number attached to it.
In a prop-firm challenge
Overtrading converts a survivable day into a breached one. Many small unplanned losses walk the account to the daily loss limit as surely as one oversized trade, and after the day turns red the habit often escalates into revenge trading. Evaluations reward the opposite shape — few trades, planned risk, repeated across the minimum trading days — a contrast drawn out in mistakes that blow evaluation accounts.