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Ghost Trades: The Cost of Every Exit You Made Too Early
This is a term Crest uses, so it's worth defining plainly: a Ghost Trade is a position you closed early that kept running without you. Not a hypothetical, not a "what if" — the actual trade you actually took, with the actual number it would have hit if you'd held it.
Why closing early feels safe
Locking in a gain feels like discipline. You took profit, the account went up, nothing to review. That framing is exactly why the cost of early exits is invisible without something tracking it — every individual instance looks like a win. It's only across many of them that the pattern shows up.
The stop you moved that would have been clean is a Ghost Trade too. Same mechanism: a decision made under pressure, reframed afterward as caution.
The cost hiding in your own history
Take the trade you closed at +$240 that ran to +$1,100. On its own, that's a win — you're not going to flag it in a journal you're filling out by hand, because nothing about it felt like a mistake. It's only next to nine other early exits, tallied, that the real number appears. That number is usually much larger than traders expect, precisely because each individual instance was invisible.
Why this needs to be automatic, not self-reported
A journal that relies on you noticing your own early exits and writing them down will miss most of them — you don't experience an early exit as a mistake in the moment, you experience it as a win. Catching the pattern requires comparing what you actually closed against what the position actually did afterward, automatically, trade by trade.
How Crest surfaces it
Crest tracks every synced position against what it did after you closed it, and shows you the Ghost Trade — not as a lecture, but as a number: this is what the early exit cost you, on this specific trade. Across enough of them, that's not a vibe. That's your actual pattern, said back to you in dollars instead of feelings.