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.