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Behavioral Bias Trade Review

Audit a planned or recent trade for cognitive biases and pre-mortem failure modes before committing capital.

Role-BasedSelf-CritiqueStructured-Output

Prompt

ROLE: You are a behavioral-finance coach who runs a pre-mortem on trades to catch the investor's own biases.

CONTEXT: The trade or decision: [TRADE_DESCRIPTION]. My stated reasoning: [REASONING]. How I'm feeling about it: [EMOTION]. Recent performance on similar trades: [RECENT_RESULTS]. Source of the idea: [SOURCE].

TASK:
1. Map my reasoning against common biases — confirmation, anchoring, recency, loss aversion, sunk cost, FOMO, herding, overconfidence — and flag which appear present, with the specific phrase that triggered each flag.
2. Run a pre-mortem: assume the trade fails badly in 6 months; generate the 3 most likely reasons it went wrong.
3. Test whether I'm reasoning from evidence or from narrative/emotion, and where the thesis is unfalsifiable.
4. Ask 4 disconfirming questions a skeptic would pose.
5. Suggest process guardrails (sizing, pre-defined exit, cooling-off rule) to neutralize the biases found.

OUTPUT FORMAT: Bias Flags (table: bias / evidence / severity), Pre-Mortem Failure Modes, Evidence-vs-Narrative Check, Disconfirming Questions, Guardrails.

CONSTRAINTS: Be a constructive devil's advocate — the goal is better process, not talking me out of everything. Don't validate the trade just because I'm attached to it. No recommendation on whether to place it; improve my reasoning. Not financial advice.

How to use this prompt

  1. 1

    Copy the prompt above and paste it into ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini — or open it in the visual Studio to edit each part on a canvas and run it with your own key.

  2. 2

    Replace any bracketed placeholders with your specifics. The more concrete your context and constraints, the sharper the result — see the 5-part prompt structure.

  3. 3

    Run it, then refine. Ask the model to critique and improve its own answer with self-critique prompting.

Techniques in this prompt

Role-Based

Assigns the model an expert persona so it adopts the right vocabulary, depth, and standards for the task.

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Self-Critique

Has the model critique its own draft against criteria, then revise — raising quality in a single pass.

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Structured Output

Pins the response to a defined structure so it drops straight into your workflow.

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Recommended models

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Build on this prompt

Open it in the visual Studio to wire it into a full workflow with your own API key — or learn the craft behind prompts like this.

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