In my experience, most discussions about stop-losses etc. are more psychological, than technical for the following reason: institutional money does not have this dilemma anyway, they simply trade the way they know and don't discuss it on the Internet, so these discussions happen among retail traders, mostly newbies only looking to become consistent. And ideas about "no stops" etc. appear more as a subconscious (or conscious) denial of the fact, that losses are inevitable in the trading business. Many people suffer from this issue. They simply refuse to admit, that losses will happen anyway, no matter what they do and try to "invent" something to avoid realized losses as much as they can. Of course not having a stop-loss and averaging down or even martingale down comes to their mind first among other similar "strategies", such as naked OTM options selling.
the biggest problem is you still dont see your 2009 example sucks. lets say i have a system which tells me to go 100% short for 365*2 days in 2 years. I go short march 6. I get stopped out. Next day it tells me to short. I go short. I stopped out. Repeat for the next 365*2 days minus 2 days. See the problem? Your example sucks!
plus, if you think its the same, why use a stop? you can just exit. stops are unnecesary, u say so yourself
Great and you're wrong......now move along. This isn't a damn guessing game. If you can't peg an entry based on a level/PA then go serve fries at McDonalds. It's getting redundant.
This game comes down to risk vs reward. Can you take a position with limited risk to extract 1...2.....3....4 10* your risk from the market? There are threads on this website that explain HOW. Yet you say it's impossible. What a joke. What you're saying is that the market is able to give EVERY strategy that uses a stop a negative edge? lol you guys need some help.
Not a classy reply, and, above all, showing that you don't have even bothered reading the previous posts, while you are pretty fast at getting gratuitously unpolite. (Which to me says already something about your intellectual level.) The questions turns out to be pretty simple: Can you imagine or create something (different from nothing) that works better than stops ? If your answer is <b>no</b>, you'd better use stops. (Just be aware that there are people that know and do better than that, but clearly one is free to cover his hears or shut down his mind and join the herd.) If your answer is instead <b>yes</b>, prove it, by letting us know what works better than stops. I doubt you have an answer, and that entirely explains why you use stops. You simply don't have choice. Tom
Here's an example of a trade setup, entry, stop and two likely profit targets: I'm curious how the "stops are for losers" camp would manage the risk of this trade.
Not everybody reasons at "single trade" level. Especially the quants who have replaced stops with different means. A strategy is a grand plan that encopassess many trades and manages the risk within a big picture. Again, the point boils down to the fact that using stop at single trade level, is, for most people, just the alternative to nothing. That is, they simply don't have any other choice. Tom
90.65 was the break of control-bar support... earlier short with same odds of success and defended with higher stop