A new 30-day Decision-Friction Archive will document anonymous situations involving time pressure, emotional shifts and rule deviation, moving financial education from knowledge delivery toward a decision process that can be recorded and reviewed
MEXICO CITY — Financial decision-making educator Aurelio Basave has announced the launch of the Decision-Friction Archive, a 30-day initiative examining how people maintain, modify or abandon previously established decision rules when confronted with uncertainty, information overload and time pressure.
The initiative will not track market prices or compare which investment choices generate higher returns. Instead, it focuses on a less frequently documented question: once someone understands the risks, writes down a rule and establishes a boundary, what ultimately causes that person to make a different decision?
“We usually record the outcome, but rarely document the moment when a rule begins to break down,” Basave said. “A decision may appear to have been triggered by the latest headline, but the real influence may have been time pressure, an emotional response, social influence or an unwillingness to acknowledge that the original judgment needs to be reconsidered.”
Documenting the Friction Before a Decision
The Decision-Friction Archive is scheduled to run from August 18 through September 16, 2026. Using anonymously submitted situations, the project will document six categories of information:
- The trigger that caused a participant to reconsider an original plan;
- The level of time pressure present when the decision was made;
- Any identifiable emotional state at the time;
- The rule or boundary established before the decision;
- The reason the participant chose to act immediately, revise the rule or pause;
- The participant’s retrospective interpretation of the original judgment.
The archive will not collect names, identity documents, income information, account details, asset holdings, specific trade instructions or investment returns. Participants will not be required to disclose the names of any actual financial products.
Participants may also use fictional scenarios to document their decision-making processes without submitting any real transaction history.
This Is Not a Ranking of Investor Performance
Basave emphasized that the Decision-Friction Archive is not a trading competition, return survey or investment-strategy test. It will not classify a participant’s decision as “right” or “wrong” based on the eventual outcome.
The project will not publish buy or sell signals, forecast the prices of equities, bonds, currencies or digital assets, or interpret a decision to pause as a missed opportunity. Instead, choosing not to act will be recorded as a distinct decision outcome.
The archive is not intended to prove that a particular rule can improve investment performance. Its purpose is to examine whether a rule remains executable under changing conditions.
For example, a risk boundary may be easy to follow in a calm environment but become difficult to maintain when prices move rapidly, online discussion intensifies or feedback arrives too frequently.
Publishing Method Changes, Not Manufacturing Conclusions
The project plans to publish one progress update each week. These updates will include the number of valid anonymous situations received, recurring categories of decision friction, changes made to the methodology and questions that remain unanswered.
Every update will clearly identify the source and limitations of the sample. Because participation is voluntary, the records will not be presented as representative of investors in Mexico, Latin America or any other population.
If participation is insufficient, the project will publish the material as observational notes rather than research findings. If the archive’s fields or classification methods change during the 30-day period, the project page will retain the version date and reason for each revision.
“Disclosing limitations is as important as publishing observations,” Basave said. “If a method works only under ideal conditions, it cannot yet be considered executable. We want to document not only how rules work, but also why they fail.”
Establishing a Basis for the Next Decision Tool
After the 30-day archive concludes, Basave plans to organize the anonymous situations into recurring categories. These observations are expected to inform a subsequent tool called the Seven Questions Before Action protocol.
The proposed protocol will ask users to write down seven elements before making a consequential financial decision: the objective, supporting evidence, possible disconfirming evidence, time boundary, risk boundary, exit condition and the conditions under which taking no action would be acceptable.
The tool will remain focused on financial decision-making education. It will not include specific financial products, security symbols, digital assets, return targets or purportedly optimal trading parameters.
“More information can expand the range of available choices, but it does not necessarily improve judgment,” Basave said. “What may need to be trained is not the ability to receive information more quickly, but the ability to define the reasoning, boundaries and exit conditions before action occurs.”
The methodology, privacy boundaries, anonymous submission process and weekly updates for the Decision-Friction Archive will be made available through Aurelio Basave’s official website.
About Aurelio Basave
Aurelio Basave focuses on behavioral finance, risk boundaries and financial decision-making education. His work seeks to turn financial judgment into a process that can be documented in advance, reviewed afterward and revised over time. His public educational content emphasizes rules, evidence and the management of uncertainty rather than specific investment recommendations or market-direction forecasts.
Official Website: https://www.aureliobasave.com/
Media Contact: [email protected]
Disclaimer: The initiative described in this release is intended solely for educational and behavioral-observation purposes. It does not constitute investment, legal, tax or personalized financial advice. Any interim observations should not be interpreted as statistical findings about a particular population or used to evaluate investment performance.
