Well, there was no respite. The stock just went lower 8 days in a row and is currently trading at $33. And of course, I could fret and fume (and I did); the reality is that I chose to not trade it, at that point, for reasons mentioned above.

And there you have yet another bias: "outcome bias." In the words of Curtis Faith, in The Way of the Turtle: "Outcome bias is the propensity to judge a decision by its outcome rather than by the quality of the decision at the time it was made."

This book is a couple of years old, but those of us who’ve been doing this for any amount of time are very well acquainted with this propensity (as I said yesterday, I've seen many smart people lose a lot -- even in brand-name companies like General Electric (GE) AIG (AIG), Intel (INTC), Cisco (CSCO) and others -- as they got sucked into the vortex of their own beliefs and analyses -- and disregarded reality.)

And outcome bias can play havoc with future trading: I might get so caught up in fuming that I might still go ahead and place the trade, only to see it reverse. Or I might miss other trading opportunities. We face this every day, and, as an active trader, I can attest it's certainly not easy to deal with.

So, I try to take inspiration from Yogi Berra's quote and move on

"I never blame myself when I'm not hitting. I just blame the bat, and if it keeps up, I change bats. After all, if I know it isn't my fault that I'm not hitting, how can I get mad at myself?"

There are many other such biases and ensuing trades; I like to name them for identification purposes (for the same reason they name hurricanes).

And Minyan James, while you're at it, why not pose such an open-ended question to the woman in your life!