Saturday, May 2, 2009

Where To Place Stop Loss?

By Hass67

The intra day forex market is full of noise that it becomes difficult for new traders to understand where to put the stop loss. There is so much noise in the forex markets in the short run that prices tend to jump 10-20 pips for no apparent reason.

Most of the new forex traders get frustrated to find their stop loss being constantly tripped due to noise even when the market is going in the anticipated direction.

Many new forex traders develop the habit of using a static 10-20 pip stop loss. This is an arbitrary decision. Many also try using a trailing stop loss. However, if placed too close; your stop hits too early. And if placed too far; you will have to forgo potential profits if the price retraces later on.

The actual reality is this that many professional forex traders do use stop loss but mostly place it on their computers making it invisible from their brokers. A better method to place a stop loss is by using a dynamic level that changes as the market rate changes.

Because if brokers find many stop losses at a particular price level they can easily trip them using a momentary blip in their price feeds. You cant do anything. It was a momentary spike during to a sudden large transaction in the market. This is known as Stop Hunting.

However, many professional forex traders only use a stop loss in their mind. They continuously keep on updating it until they get the desired outcome. But you will need a lot of experience trading the forex markets to do this.

Moving Averages, Bollinger Bands, SARs etc can be easily used as dynamic stop losses by you. It is a good way to manage your risk while letting the currency markets to do what it wants.

The more experienced a trader you will become, the more you are going to realize that placing fixed stop losses actually hurts you more emotionally, psychologically and profit wise than help you.

Never ever trade, just before a major economic news release. Dont place your stop loss close to or at round numbers and at times of thin liquidity in the markets.

You should understand that your broker can and will use stop hunting to take out your positions using noise in the market as an excuse. Forex trading and casinos have many things in common. You should learn how to beat the markets and the brokers only then you will become a successful forex trader.

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