Why do new reasons to hold appear only after the price falls?
Why this matters. The reasons feel discovered. They were generated — and the drawdown is what generated them.
You bought for one reason. The price fell. Now you have four reasons, and each of them is individually plausible. None of them existed at 10am.
The tell is the timestamp
A reason found before the position moved against you and a reason found after are not the same kind of object, even when the words are identical. The first survived a moment when you had nothing at stake. The second arrived exactly when you needed it.
This is motivated reasoning working normally — not a defect of character, and not a thing you can notice from the inside. Reasons arriving under pressure feel like research. They feel better than the original reason, because they are newer and they fit the current price.
Why "just be objective" fails
It fails because it asks you to detect, in the moment, a process that is designed to be undetectable from the inside. Practitioner testimony: Mark Douglas built a whole book on the claim that traders must "think in probabilities". That is not evidence about how minds work — it is a coaching formulation. What survives translation is narrow and useful: judge an idea across a class of similar situations, not by this one open position.
What works instead is dating your reasons.
The artefact
A reason log with timestamps. Each line: the date, the claim, and where it came from. When a reason appears mid-position, it goes in the log with today's date — not blended into the original thesis.
Then the test is mechanical and needs no self-honesty at all: would this reason have been in the log yesterday? If the answer is no, it is a candidate for post-hoc support, and you can weigh it accordingly. You are not asking yourself to be objective. You are asking a file what it said.
Try it now
Write down one position you are following. List every reason you hold it, and put a date beside each. The ones you cannot date are the ones to look at hardest.