Hi,
is it possible to trade without setting stop losses? for example an intra-day trader who is watching the screen for a few hours, enters a trade, then take a hit, but lets the trade keep running until it overcomes the loss and becomes profitable?
If your position size is small enough that you can’t possibly go bust from any size drawdown, then obviously you could. However, this also means your profit potential would be reduced by an identical proportion. Also, how long do you want to wait until price returns in your favor? If you had took a short EU position in 2003, you would still not be in profit.
I thought the very same thing starting out and let one bad trade run for 4 days and it bit me in the a$$ for half my account. A stop is the best way to preserve capital. You want to be able to trade another day. Besides, if your entry is good enough, your stop-loss shouldn’t matter.
Atleast have an “OMG” SL (far away from price action) incase of computer failure, catastrophic news event, etc.
you left it running 4 days? man that is nuts lol. i would let the bad trade run for about an hour or 2, until the loss is overcome, I will avoid fridays, too unpredictable!
See… Here’s the thing.
I doesn’t always come back;)
Keep doing what you are doing, and you’ll find out.
Obviously, it depends on timeframe. 4 days of drawdown is absolutely nothing to a swing trader.
As MasterTang pointed out and I suggested via an example, it is very likely that price will never retrace to hit your profit target or your break-even.
Losses are part of trading. If you dont accept them, and you start to develop strategies to avoid losses, then sooner or later you will blow your account.
What if it doesn’t overcome the loss? Perhaps you’ve hit a bottom/top and price keeps dropping. What if something catastrophic happens again like a flash crash like on May 6th where price dropped nearly 400 pips in the matter of an hour on some currencies and causing you to hit your margain call.
[B]Give your money a bodyguard.[/B]
Remember those storied really rich guys tell that ‘I once rose, then I had the biggest fall ever & now Im back up to stay’? Its the same with almost every other trader telling of that one time they got bit hard. Both didnt use a stoploss mechanism.
This is a subject that comes up often in this forum. There is no trick to trading without a stop loss, and if it worked you can bet every pro trader in the world would do so. But, all the pro traders I know trade with a stop loss, though some are wider than I would personally be comfortable with. The trick is to learn to trade with a stop loss and only very rarely have it hit. Once you do that, you are well on your way to learning to trade.
That’s no simple trick though. It took me years to learn and I’m still working on it every day. Some days everything works perfectly, like today. Some days I’m astonished at my own stupidity. Learning how to trade isn’t about learning how to win. Winning is easy when the market goes your way. Learning how to trade is about learning how to not lose. That is very hard, but of course, if you can learn to not lose, you are only left with wins and break evens. To learn to not lose, you should become an expert in money management. A cornerstone of money management is a stop loss. Just my own personal opinion. I wish you well and many good pips.
I stopped using stop losses I while ago, and it’s made a positive difference in my trading. Now, I’m not say placing stop losses shouldn’t be placed. But you need to know where to put them, or else they will get hit guaranteed.
I would always place them in the wrong spots, or there were would be to much volatility in the market, stopping me out, before moving in the favor of my trade (had it still been open). If all my previous stop losses were my profit targets, I’d be rich by now. 
But now I trade only the daily charts and up. I ball-park adjust my positions, so if this go completely the opposite way of my trade, I don’t break the bank. And I have enough time to examine the trade and close it if things aren’t going well.
Plus I trade Pin Bars now, which are amazing price patterns, which rarely fail. Those few trades that go wrong as easily made up my all the winners.
Synergy
I never use stop losses. I only use trailing stops on the MT4 platform works great