There's a specific moment inside a winning streak that decides whether the streak ends the account or just ends itself.

It isn't the trade that finally loses.

It isn't the system breaking down, because the system usually hasn't changed at all.

It isn't even the losing streak that eventually follows, because every real edge produces one of those on a long enough timeline.

It happens three or four trades earlier, the moment size gets bumped up because the last few trades worked.

Researchers gave that decision a name: the house money effect.

Most traders have never heard the term.

Fewer still know a 1990 study found people will risk money they just won more freely than money that was already sitting in the account, even though a broker statement can't tell the difference between the two.

It isn't really about the streak. It's about which dollars feel like they're already spent.

One simulation built for this report holds a real, positive-edge system perfectly constant and only changes how much of the account gets risked per trade. At normal size, the odds of a serious drawdown round to zero. Scaled up the way a hot streak tempts most traders to scale, those odds cross 1 in 2.

Another walks a hypothetical $50,000 funded account through eleven trades. A four-win streak. A drawdown floor that rose right along with it. One ordinary loss that would have meant nothing at the original size instead ends the evaluation.

Neither one required a worse strategy.

Both required one sizing decision, made exactly when it felt least necessary to question it, that a flatter, more ordinary day would never have allowed.

That decision has a name, a body of research behind it, and a documented cost that shows up specifically in the trades right after your best week, not your worst one.

All of it is laid out below, with the exact page where each piece is discussed.