Of the conditions affecting traders, a particularly unfortunate one is known as “learned helplessness,” a state in which a person loses all faith in his ability to control his own fate. It has been found that animals exposed repeatedly to uncontrollable stressors may pathetically fail to leave the cage in which this experiment was conducted if the door is left open. Traders, after weeks and months of losses and volatility, may similarly give up, slumping in their chairs and failing to respond to profit opportunities they would only recently have leaped on. In fact there is some evidence
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