More on Stop Losses

How important are stop losses? Are they really required? Almost everyone who starts have trading would want to do trading in the right way and hence start off by having SL for all their trades. Due to the inexperience and lack of knowledge and various other factors, they choose wrong points to have their SL. The result is that the price hits their SL,closes their trade and then turns back and then carries on in the direction of the trade and the user is then heart broken.

This happens 5-6 times within a very short span of time and then the user comes to a conclusion that stops are of no use and then stops using the stop losses (!!). What happens then? 70% of the time, it leads to the account going up in smoke and rest of the 30% of the time, due to their good luck, the trade turns back and what was negative now becomes positive. That sounds great, aint it? If 30% of the time, if the trade does turn back in your favor, I guess most of us would be happy. But what we tend to do is conveniently forget the snowballing effect of negative trades.

Now lets look at what all we lose due to negative trades apart from the fact that we lose money. On the face of it, it seems that whatever amount we are in negative is the only loss that we have due to losing trades. But just think of the other losses that are not so obvious. Lets say that you short GBPJPY and the price goes against you. You donave a stop loss and by the end of the day it becomes -50 pips. Next day, it teases you, runs back and forth and then again turns against you even more and the loss becomes -100 and assume that it keeps doing this for a week and after one week, you find that the trade is -125 pips against you. You are too scared to take any other trade till this trade gets over and so you wait and keep watching this trade alone.So you have lost 125 pips worth of money so far.
But is that all? As said before, you are too scared to take any other trade. You have locked the premium money that you paid for the trade, you have locked 125 pips worth of money for about a week and also you have locked some more, say 100-200 pips of more money which you have had in your balance to sustain further losses. This means that roughly you would have locked about $300 on a mini account for a week.

If you had your SL at 75 pips, it would have got hit maybe on the second day of your trade and though you have lost 75 pips, the closed losing trade would have freed up all the locked money listed above. Using the $300 of freed money, in a weeks time, with proper trading, you could have easily made much more than 75 pips on GBPJPY. One more thing, in the above losing trade, by the time the price turns in your favor, you are exhausted, tired and tensed due to your wait and what do you do? Once the price turns in your favor and once you see just 5-10 pips of profit, you are overjoyed, you don’t want to lose the minute profit and you want to get out of this trade somehow. So instead of letting this profit ride on, you closed this trade and you are very happy for having survived the trade without a SL.

But just imagine how much you have lost from the above. You locked in $300 worth of money on a mini account for a week, did not take any other trades for a week, was scared to the hilt, was watching your monitor wasting electricity, not have proper food just to make 10 pips of profit in a week?

If you had had a SL, and if you are confident of your trading, you could have just digested the loss and moved on and made much more money by digesting the loss from your trade rather than wait for it to turn back. So try to use a SL as much as possible but at the same time, try to have it at the correct point. Study each trade, place your TP and SL at the correct points and enjoy your trading.

Happy Trading!!