ABOUT HOLDY LAB

Built on Established Behavioral Science

Holdy doesn't diagnose your personality. It observes what you actually do in simulated market sessions and compares it to your own history — using a methodology grounded in decades of published behavioral finance research, not guesswork.

How we form an insight

Every insight Holdy shows you follows the same discipline: an observed action, the context it happened in, your own baseline, how many times we've seen it, how confident we are, and one small experiment to try next. We never say "you are a FOMO trader." We say things like "in 14 of 19 comparable situations, you entered after the price had already accelerated — and your average risk and outcome changed measurably when you did."

Our behavioral engine currently evaluates your sessions against the ten most well-documented cognitive biases in behavioral finance, plus five deeper behavioral cuts (how your risk changes with your PnL state, how firmly your rules hold under pressure, and more) — a set that keeps growing as more session data lets us validate new patterns responsibly. Every pattern carries a confidence level and a sample size; nothing is shown as a fact from a handful of trades.

The research

Behavioral finance is not a marketing metaphor — it's an established field of economics. A few of the papers our detectors are built on:

Kahneman & Tversky, "Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk," Econometrica, 1979

The founding paper of behavioral economics — how people actually weigh gains and losses, not how classical theory assumed they would. Kahneman received the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for this line of work.

Richard Thaler — 2017 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences

Awarded for incorporating psychologically realistic assumptions into economic decision-making analysis.

Shefrin & Statman, "The Disposition to Sell Winners Too Early and Ride Losers Too Long," Journal of Finance, 1985

The original description of the disposition effect — closing winning positions early and holding losing ones too long.

Odean, "Are Investors Reluctant to Realize Their Losses?," Journal of Finance, 1998

Empirical confirmation of the disposition effect using real brokerage account data.

Odean, "Do Investors Trade Too Much?," American Economic Review, 1999

Overconfidence and excessive trading frequency among individual investors, and how both erode returns.

Barber & Odean, "Trading Is Hazardous to Your Wealth," Journal of Finance, 2000

Overtrading measurably lowers net returns for individual investors.

Barber & Odean, "Boys Will Be Boys: Gender, Overconfidence, and Common Stock Investment," Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2001

How overconfidence varies and consistently affects trading performance.

Gervais & Odean, "Learning to Be Overconfident," Review of Financial Studies, 2001

How self-attribution bias — crediting skill for lucky outcomes — builds overconfidence over time.

Barber, Lee, Liu & Odean, "Just How Much Do Individual Investors Lose by Trading?," Review of Financial Studies, 2009

A direct quantification of what behavioral trading mistakes cost individual investors.

Kumar, "Who Gambles in the Stock Market?," Journal of Finance, 2009

The preference for lottery-like, high-variance positions, and its link to worse outcomes.

Why simulation-based training works

Pilots

Pilots train on simulators long before a real flight. A simulator doesn't guarantee a pilot never makes a mistake — but it sharply reduces the odds of a catastrophic one.

Athletes

Athletes train against machines and review game film. Neither guarantees a win — but both measurably improve technique and cut down on unforced errors.

Trading

Traders already use demo accounts, backtesting and journals. Holdy is the next layer: not just a demo account, but behavioral analytics built on top of one.

What Holdy is not

Holdy does not diagnose personality or mental health, does not label behavior as a disorder, and does not predict real-market profitability. Every pattern is a measurable hypothesis about your behavior in simulated sessions — evidence, confidence and sample size included — never a clinical claim.