Stop loss dilemma -- to use SL or not to use SL, it's a problem

Likely a Forex term, ie a contract or multiple, if you trade stock them think of it as a small position.

 

if a profit gets too large too fast I buy protection by evening out it's size, so the only kind of "massive downside losses" I can endure are loss of paper profit

it's really a matter of taking a good hard look at evrything you have on before you go to sleep and imagining the worse case scenario

the alternative is using hard fixed money stops, and I don't do that

 

well, I'm a very small trader, but I've never traded a "lot"

again off topic, this part of thread should be moved to forex or bucketshop "What is a lot?"

do they let you enter stops on lots?

 

because, when you are trading correlated instruments (spreads) a "massive downside loss" on one side may not give you a profit on the other side, but it should start moving in your favor.

The whole point is, I can't predict how violent the moves will be, so there is no intelligent way for me to put in a fixed money stop, but I can try to keep every thing relevent.

 

one way or the other, you are buying insurance, whether you use stops or options or spreads.

 

insurance can be kind of trippy, we all have fears, but there is no end of insurance you can buy for every little one of your fears. At some point you need to take on some risk, and that is never a sure thing.

 

the funny thing about stops is, traders use them because they fear if they don't the market will just keep running against them

but when they have a profit they are always sure the market will turn at any moment

 

so getting back to it, I'd rather have on a position small enough, or a large position spread, that I can go to sleep knowing I can probably survive a bad move, and wake up with a loss, than wake up having gotten stopped out of what would have been good positions.

 

just put your stop at the point where u think the trade has gone wrong...if that point is a long way from your entry, too bad.

 

my broker will track a trailing stop before it is entered on the chart. So pick a number, any number, $100, or $1000 that you want to risk, you can enter a trailing stop and watch it on the chart until it makes sense