Why do your wins feel like skill and your losses like bad luck?

Why this matters. Applied consistently, this asymmetry means experience makes you more confident without making you better — and the two are almost impossible to tell apart from the inside.

A position works and the reasoning was sound. One fails and conditions were unusual. Neither judgement feels like a bias while you are making it; both feel like an accurate reading of what happened.

Why this is worse in markets than elsewhere

Because it needs ambiguous feedback to survive, and markets supply exactly that. In a kind environment the attribution gets corrected — you claimed skill, the result was repeatable or it was not, and you found out quickly. Here you rarely find out at all.

So the asymmetry is not merely present; it is protected by the environment, which is the theme of Why is a market the worst possible place to learn from experience?.

Why it resists honesty

Not because people are dishonest. Because the attribution is made after the outcome is known, when the outcome supplies the material for the explanation. Reviewing yourself honestly after the fact is fighting on ground already lost.

What changes it

Attributing before you know. Write what would count as skill and what would count as luck for this position, at entry, while both are still available.

Practitioner testimony, with its survivorship caveat: Howard Marks's Oaktree memos are unusually valuable to this domain for exactly one structural reason — they are dated and public, so his reasoning is on record before the outcome was known. That is not proof his method works; it is a demonstration that the practice is possible.

The artefact

A pre-registered attribution, one line at entry: if this works it will be because ___; if it fails it will be because ___.

Afterwards, compare. The comparison is uncomfortable, mechanical, and the only version of this that works — because the alternative asks you to be fair about yourself at the precise moment you are least able to be.

Try it now

Write both halves for something you are considering. Keep it somewhere you will find it later.