The reason moving stops is so hard to quit is a memory bias: you vividly remember the time price came back and saved you, and forget the times it kept going. Let's do the honest expected-value math, because it's decisive.
The asymmetry
When you move a stop, one of two things happens. It comes back — you save one stop's worth of loss, a bounded, small win. It keeps going — you now hold a trade that's already proven wrong, and the loss grows, sometimes to several times your intended stop. So the payoff is fundamentally asymmetric: limited upside (avoid one small loss) versus open-ended downside (an unbounded larger loss). That shape alone makes the habit negative-EV before you count a single trade.
The math over many trades
Say moving the stop “works” 60% of the time, saving 1 unit, and fails 40%, costing an extra 3 units (a modest estimate for a leveraged option that runs). EV per override = (0.60 × +1) + (0.40 × −3) = 0.6 − 1.2 = −0.6 units every time you do it. Even at a 70% “save” rate, a large enough failure makes it negative. The occasional saves are real — and mathematically dwarfed by the failures they train you to keep risking.
The save you remember is worth one unit. The blow-up you don't is worth many. Average them and moving stops loses money — reliably, not occasionally.
Why memory hides it
The saves are frequent, immediate, and emotionally vivid (relief!); the failures are rarer but far larger and easy to rationalize as “just a bad trade.” So your gut tallies the wins and discounts the losses, and concludes the habit works — while your equity curve says otherwise. This is exactly the bias a hard automated stop defends against. Trust the EV, not the memory: leave the stop where you set it.