Three questions before jumping into a wave (the anti-FOMO filter)

Core idea

When price has just zipped by and your hand wants to click, there are three questions you must finish answering before you're allowed to act: (1) What's my reason for entering THIS WAVE? (2) What's the success probability of this decision? (3) What if there's an even better wave after this one? Question 3 is the FOMO-killer, because it rests on a technical fact: the bigger the wave, the more it's guaranteed to have a pullback point.

Details

1. The three questions (the exact wording the teacher reads out in the session)

1. "What's my reason for entering this wave?" — not "the market's going up," it has to be a specific pattern on a specific timeframe. If you can't say it in one sentence → you have no reason.
2. "What's the success probability of this decision?" — estimate it yourself. If it comes out around 50/50, skip it (see the table of three zone types in Getting Comfortable with Uncertainty, getting comfortable with uncertainty).
3. "What if there's an even better wave coming after this one?" — even if that next wave gets entered at a higher price.

2. Why question 3 is stronger than the first two

The first two questions guard against technical mistakes; question 3 guards against the feeling of scarcity — the thing that actually pushes people into bad trades. It works because of two arguments:

a) The price doesn't matter — POSITION is what matters. Entering higher but with a clear entry point + clear SL means you dare to use a big size, and the final profit ends up much larger than entering "cheap" at a murky position where you have to use small size. FOMO traders optimize the wrong variable: they optimize entry price, when the thing that determines the money is position quality.

b) A big wave always has a pullback point. Verbatim: "price can't run hard forever without a pullback point — the bigger the wave, the more it has to have a dip." If not on 15m, then H1; if not H1, then H2/H4. The feeling that "if I don't enter now it'll just run away" is exactly the market lulling your psychology to sleep (see Mastery vs. Habit — mastery vs habit).

Paragraph: The teacher even challenges the class: review the base of every wave from every time price ran hard, and you won't find a single big wave that ran without a pullback point to enter at. If you missed it, you missed it because you weren't watching, not because the point didn't exist.

3. The typical FOMO behavior chain

Price zips up → chase-buy → zips back down → left dazed. The teacher closes with a short line: "no matter what wave it is, it'll always come back" (Careful: the auto-generated subtitles mangled this into a homophone error — a clear transcription mistake).

Paragraph: The painful part: people skip all three questions not because they don't know them, but because in the moment price is running, emotion manages to act before reason manages to ask — the mechanism covered in kiem soat cam xuc truoc khi kip suy nghi (controlling emotion before you can think).

Putting it into practice

1. Stick the three questions next to your screen. This is a filter that only works if you can read it in 3 seconds, not the kind you have to open a file to look up.
2. Mandatory: type out the answer before clicking the order button — even just one line. Having to write it out takes long enough for emotion to cool down (the same mechanism as but giay nen, the pen–paper–candle exercise).
3. The teacher's homework: open the chart, find stretches where price ran hard in the past, mark the base of the wave for each stretch — prove to yourself that an entry point always exists. Only after doing it enough times will question 3 carry real emotional weight instead of just being theory.
4. If you've already FOMO'd in: handle it by the timeframe you entered on, don't shift your expectation to a bigger timeframe to try to save the trade (see Psychology must move with action ("whatever the action, that's the psychology"), psychology going hand-in-hand with action).

What the teacher stresses / common traps

• A subtle trap: answering question 1 with a retroactive reason ("well, it's rising") — that's rationalizing after the action, not a reason before the action.
• The "enter small just so I don't feel regret" trap: it's still FOMO, just smaller; and it teaches your brain that FOMO is allowed as long as the size is small.
• Question 3 isn't a comforting platitude — it's a technical assertion about wave structure. Anyone who doesn't believe it yet has to go do the wave-base homework until they do.

Related lessons

• Entry point (entry point) — the technical conditions for a valid entry point
• Getting Comfortable with Uncertainty (getting comfortable with uncertainty) — the 50/50 zone and the three-question gatekeeping set (the technical version)