If your protective stops are causing you to consistently lose money, then they are not properly aligned with your entry timing. You may have to rework your your entry timing, your protective stop placement, or both. Simply because one or more components of your strategy are not working properly, it does not necessarily mean that you can do without them. For example, my car's winter tires are fairly worn and will probably not be effective this coming winter. Therefore, it would probably be wiser to replace those tires with better ones rather than just doing away with tires altogether. But maybe that's just me.
Protective stops should be a function of current volatility levels. No fixed stop loss levels will be efficient. Markets are constantly changing their behavioral patterns. You need to adopt your stop loss calculations to them. Psychological profile of any market can be stable only for a short period of time.
Ahh yes, because anytime you lose money it must be a major conspiracy! I knew there was some smoke-filled room somewhere where 50 millionaires were watching my stop orders and sending secret subliminal messages through porn channels for me to keep my stops tight and pull my shorts down! And even better, you offer me the advice of how to beat them! THANK YOU! Just buy and hold forever, what FABULOUS ADVICE! If I buy it at 200 and it goes to 10 I have beat the conspiracy, I knew there was a way! WOW! I will never understand you conspiracy theorists except to say if you ever become enlightened and begin to blame yourself for your bad trading instead of some unseen powers-that-be you might have a chance to succeed. It's a liquid market, ninny! If they can take advantage of idiots with tight stops, so can you, and me (I do already), and everyone here. Buying and holding forever is not the answer, cutting losses short makes me a ton of loot. Must really piss off all those big Wall Street players behind the huge conspiracy eh?
You should be patting yourself on the back (you will understand this in a few years). You make your rules and you stick by them. In time the market will provide you with the wins, since currently we have an illiquid, prolonged, choppy, sideways market. The key is to be able to trade another day. Give yourself kudos and don't focus on the "what-if's". We'd all go crazy and lose our shirts if we did.
You make your rules and stick by them if you have very good reason to believe that by doing so your rules will end up winning in the end. Unfortunately I don't think enough information has been given to allow us to determine if there is enough basis to continue standing by his rules.
So THAT's why you guys have twenty monitors each... I didn't know there were that many porn channels available! I am so naive...
Everybody has a stop-loss. For the conservative it's a hard stop, for the daring it's a soft one, for those bound to go broke it's either a pain threshold or a margin call. If your stops get constantly hit right before the market reverses (which without proper backtesting maybe just a "selective" memory), just reduce your position size and widen your stop (as someone already recommended). If you can't reduce your position size because you're trading the minimum size, get a job (no offense), save some money and fund your account properly. Best trading, Jorge