Placing a stop loss on a long futures contract. I'm a stock guy testing the waters in futures. Are stops Useful? Required? A good way to get screwed? Caveats?
depends...I ALWAYS use them on positions held overnight, but not necessarily always on intra-day positions. Always use them in the beans, but rarely use a "hard" stop in the corn or wheat markets intra-day. I'd recommend them for sure, and eventually you'll get better at knowing where to place a stop that will save you from an adverse move, and where not to place stops that are obvious "traps".