Stops are not insurance. Puts and calls are. If the market gaps through your stop you're at the mercy of the mkt. Stops only really work when you don't need them. Either close the position before major macro releases or trade synthetic calls and puts and take the hit on volatility (long futures + put = synth-call; short futures + call = synth-put). The synthetic will replicate the natural put or call (same strike). You will take a pre-post news hit on vol, but the position will replicate the option single. The point of using synthetics into news is to not force you out of the actual futures-side.
I just started trading futures last week and will not touch the Mini contracts, only micro which moves fast enough on 1 contract let alone 4. The big drop actually didn't happen on the NFP #s. It happened on the 10am inflation report on the survey of consumers that showed a jump in their inflation expectations.
nlv is mostly set at 20% (80% loss) of account balance by the brokers but it is not a guarantee on fast moving ticks. i had just once experiencing negative balance on nq but never on es, even the broker/system was too slow to liquidate the position after the balance is already in the red. stay away nq if you don't have big account.
Thank you for this detailed response. I chatted with NTs AI chatbot and a real person emailed me asking for much of the information that you are suggesting that I gather. So they are at least going to help figure out what happened. I will post the result of whatever concludes.
I blew multiple $25K accounts starting out, so I'm not judging you. I'm going to try to get you off the big loser hamster wheel while there is still time. Listen up. NT did nothing wrong, and your stop loss was not "ignored." There were simply no other traders in the world willing to take the other side of your stop loss until price dropped to a level 98 points below the level at which you wanted to get out. You were using a stop market order , so once your stop price traded, that resting order converted to a market order. It was filled as soon as a market existed to match you, a seller ta the market, with a buyer willing to trade at the then prevailing market price. You over leveraged. You were trading NQ at $80/point. Furthermore you were in a position ahead of news that will almost always cause volatile price movements. You have no one to blame but yourself. You just started trading two weeks ago, and you're swinging, if my math is correct, futures contracts with a notional value of $1.7 million dollars ahead of non-farm payroll data? Here's what you should do. First, educate yourself about the basics of the markets and the various order types. Then learn just what a futures contract represents in terms of notional value and real risk. Then, if you still want to do this, go to Topstep, and sign up for a $49/month evaluation account, and learn to trade in the combine. This is a mind f*ck business if there ever was one. But it is we ourselves who do the damage, not the markets. You can either learn a lesson from this, accept responsibility, and move forward or quit, and both are good options. But what you don't want to do is ignore your role in this loss and still continue to trade. Good luck.
Thanks everybody for the responses so far. As further context, I have been trading everyday with simulation accounts for about 8 months and a real money account for 2 weeks. Stop losses, including NT's account Stop Loss Limit, have always worked pretty well, with next to zero slippage, so perhaps I had developed too much reliance on them. I had thought that there might be an error with NT because the NT application literally signaled 2 error messages and the chart froze at the moment the bar began to drop below my stop position. Some folks have suggested that my major error was to have open positions during the NFP release. Makes sense and I thought I was being cautious about major news events. As one person mentioned though, the NFP came out at 8:30 ET and my long trade was taking place at 10:00 am while the market seemed to be floating higher on the news. I was not aware of the pending University of Michigan release on consumer expectations or the impact that it might have. Again, I appreciate everyone's comments. I'm still trying to understand how often this kind of thing might occur and what the main takeaway should be from this experience.
I was not over NFP, it was 10am regular trading hours. NQ spiked down 100+ points in about 5 seconds during regular trading hours (RTH). Still shows how prices can spike even during RTH on some market moving event that isn't in the economic calendars..