Saturday, May 2, 2009

Know How To Place Stop Loss?

By Hass67

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.

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.

Stop hunting is something the brokers are continuously doing. If a broker finds many stop losses at a particular price level on his price feed; he can easily trip them using a momentary blip in the price. You cant even complain. 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.

Dynamic stop losses can be easily placed using Moving Averages, Bollinger Bands, SARs etc. Using a dynamic stop loss is a good way to manage your risk while letting the currency markets do what it wants.

The more experience you will develop as a forex trader the more you are going to understand that placing fixed stop losses actually hurts more. Using fixed stop losses can hurt you more emotionally, psychologically and profit wise than help you.

You should not try to trade before or after a major economic news release. You should not try to place stop loss close to or at round numbers. And you should also not try to 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.

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