Drive me crazy

Anyone know this? You know exactly where it goes. You know it, you feel it. You stalk that little ****er goes up and down and then takes you in the trade, Hurray!!

But wait! Its start to push against you. 5 Pips…10 Pips…Okay take it easy, my stop is 25…
So you wait, full secure it will go to your target…18 Pips…20…
5 Pips away from the stop you start to get tiner and tiner…you look at the chart again and you are sure, you are right…100%…well okay, maybe 80%…
BUM…Stop lost hit. You breathe out and tell yourself “Next time” . The market makes a turn around and swaps directly to your target, AFTER it toke you out.

I was right…i was sooo right…

See you on the Pipwave. :26:

… apart from in your stop-loss placement, you mean (on that occasion, as it turned out)? I know the feeling! Unfortunately, getting the overall direction right most of the time isn’t enough, in itself, to make steady profits.

Na, the feeling after like a little Dog who left behind "Damn, i was right…the turn, the target…everything right…beside the SL :smiley: "

I know the feeling well, I might have the record for most SL hit to the exact pip before reversing, well maybe not really but it seems that way sometimes. I have long since come to the conclusion that I suck at shot term trading, Now I trade mostly off of daily charts, taking directional trades that I plan to hold for weeks or months, Stop loss orders have been replaced with the discipline to manually exit bad trades at pre-determine price levels. Not an exciting way to trade, but it keeps my accounts growing

I know this frustration. But Please post some of your trades with photos. One of my earliest problems was being patient enough to hit my entry point. Then placing my stop losses at a point where I was sure if they were hit my entire idea was just wrong.

I think that almost every trader knows this feeling. And it sucks so much. Every time you say to yourself why didn’t I close it myself when it was at X pips…I should’ve seen this coming…I should’ve known. Situations like these teach us that this is part of the game (figuratively speaking) so we should not feel bad or be sorry for that missed trade as like you said, there will be always “next time”. The gained experience is way more important.

It does sound like you’re trading intra-day up-and-down action on very short time-frames with very tight pip parameters for entry and stop, so much so that the TA available will be unable to give any usable indication of potential stall or reversal.

Its my idea of hell. Why are you doing it this way?

You just described word for word some (a lot) of my trading experiences. And you’re right, it’s supremely frustrating when it happens.

These things are all relative: to some of us, 25 pips would be a really [I]wide[/I] stop-loss.

Suppose so. But if they can’t do it, why keep doing it?

That’s too “psychological” for me …

Except to mention that none of us was born knowing how to do any of this stuff, and we’ve all had a learning curve?

And that I suspect your comment was in part motivated by the disdain you have for intraday trades and your belief that their adherent TA parameters are “too unreliable to be worthwile” (we don’t disagree about many things, but we do, there).

Setting stops is a hard one… When I started trading I was getting hit all the time and it was doing my head in… as it slowly chips away at your account. Now with more experience I can pick market direction with more accuracy so stops aren’t in the equation as much. I am still alarmed at how often a trade initially goes against you at entry… No faith in the system still…

[U]I am in NO way suggesting to not use a stop…[/U]
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I no longer use set stops and just rely on a mental stop. But I do set an opposite trade without a TP (hedge) double the distance I would normally set a SL so in the case of a “flash crash” against my trade I can cover the loss with an opposing trade.

To cover off the constant 1-5 pip reversals before hitting TP, I have an automated SL that activates once my position has moved to a set number of pips into a trade. ie: I have a TP set at say 35 pips, when my position has reached the rough ATR of the session (say 20 pips) it opens a SL at 15 pips so if the price does reverse I’m still out with a profit.

This strategy does close a lot of trades earlier than I would like but generally ensures approx. 80% profitable trades.