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Loss porn

Posting large losses for entertainment, common in speculative forums, where it functions as both honesty and a way to make ruin look funny.

Loss posts started as a counterweight to gain-porn and do something useful: they make variance visible and break the illusion that everyone else is winning.

They also normalise the behaviour that produced them. A community that applauds a sixty thousand dollar loss as content is rewarding the position sizing, not just the honesty, and the laughter can make a serious problem easier to keep making.

Read them for the process rather than the number. The instructive part is the sizing decision and the state the trader was in, which is usually visible in the comments and almost never in the screenshot.

Related: gain-porn, yolo, full-port, gambling-disorder-signs

See it drawn

Original diagrams for the ideas on this page. Illustrative, not real market data.

How a position size is worked outAccount size, risk per trade and stop distance feed into one box giving the number of shares.ACCOUNT SIZE$25,000your capitalRISK PER TRADE1%of the accountSTOP DISTANCE$0.50entry to stopPOSITION SIZE500 sharesrisk budget: $25,000 × 1% = $250position size: $250 ÷ $0.50 = 500 shares
Working out a position size. Three numbers decide how big a trade is: the account, the share of it put at risk, and the distance from entry to stop. One percent of $25,000 is a $250 budget, and a $0.50 stop divides into that 500 times.

Educational only, not advice. Spotted an error? Post in Site Feedback.