Know How To Place Stop Losses?

The forex markets are highly volatile. There is so much noise in the intra day forex market; it becomes difficult for new retail forex traders to know where to put the stop loss. The prices in the intra day market keeps on jumping 10-20 pips for no apparent reason.

This becomes frustrating for many new day traders. Most constantly find their stop losses being tripped due to noise even when the rates are going in the anticipated direction.

A static 10-20 pip stop loss is an arbitrary choice many traders make. Many new traders also use Trailing Stop Loss. Place your trailing stop loss too close and you will find your stop hit too early. Place it too far and you will have to forgo potential profits if the price retraces.

Many professional forex traders do use stop loss but mostly place it on their computers hiding them from their brokers. Best way to place a stop loss is using a dynamic level.

No body will ever tell you that your broker may be stop hunting against you. When a broker finds many stop loss orders at a particular rate on his price feed; he will try to trip these stops using a momentary blip in the feed. If you complain the broker will explain that the momentary spike happened due to a sudden large transaction in the market.

More often than not, professional traders, trade with a stop loss at all, only keeping a mental stop loss. But you will need a lot of experience to trade this way.

Using dynamic stop losses such as Moving Averages, Bollinger Bands, SARs etc is a better way to reduce your risk while allowing the markets to do what it wants.

With more experience, you will learn that placing fixed stop losses actually harms more. Rather than helping, using a fixed stop loss can hurt you more emotionally, psychologically and profit wise.

Try not to trade just before or after a major economic news release. Try not to place stop loss close to/at round numbers. And try not trade in times of thin liquidity in the currency markets.

It is important for you to know that brokers constantly use stop hunting to take out your positions using noise in the market as an excuse. Learn how to beat the markets and the brokers.