How effective is using stop loss?

If you don’t have stop loss, you can’t size your position and you can’t control risk. Many people will argue otherwise but it’s the way it is. The stop loss distance defines how many contracts you have to buy/sell to achieve a certain risk.

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A stop loss is like a seat belt, you don’t need to expect it everytime you get into a car, but when you need it you are happy it’s there.

The best stop out percentage is 15% to 20%

This is the simple truth for all those considering not using a stop-loss but even worse not even identifying a stop-loss price.

If you don’t know where you would exit, you don’t know how much you are risking. So maybe you’re risking every penny in your account on every trade, you just don’t know it yet.

Not knowing the risk is like not knowing the price of something in a shop.

Now that’s something really important for every trader. Knowing the entry/exit points is too crucial while we trade and can have a good impact on what we gain/loose. Traders must be careful of this.

What a stop loss strategy also does is it gives you a disciplined system to sell losing trades and invest the proceeds in your current best ideas.

Stop loss is the most important check in trading. There is no need of SL if you are using low leverage

I don’t think so…even if the leverage is low…I will suggest you to place a SL.

yeah market is unpredictable

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Could you explain this more?

Your financial risk is purely the product of your position size and the number of pips it moves. The market moves regardless of your leverage.

The only affect of low leverage is that a greater chunk of your capital is reserved against your positions which restricts the maximum size of trade you can take. But it has no impact on the money at risk from the trade.

It you are managing your risk by limiting the potential percentage loss then you need a stoploss at that point. This is not linked to the leverage used.

So I don’t understand what you mean here? Perhaps you could explain more, thanks! :smiley:

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Exactly… :slight_smile:

But if you have a continuous eye on your trades with less leverage i don’t think you need to apply SL in that case you can just close the trades when you see market is depreciating

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It is irrelevant what your leverage is.

The market moves the same distance whether your leverage is 1:30 or 1:1000, for example. And your losses would be the same wherever you get out regardless of the leverage on your account.

And what if your system goes down while you are watching your screen so diligently and the market dives? The gain/loss on your position while it is out of your control is the same regardless of your account leverage.

The only impact of leverage on your account is how much of your equity your brokers reserves against your open positions as initial margin. On top of that initial margin your total used margin then also includes the profit/loss of your open positions which is entirely dependent on how far the market moves and has nothing to do with your leverage percentage.

Naturally, you can just monitor your trades and close them when you see fit - but your trade result will be the same whatever leverage you are using. So the choice of whether to use a SL has nothing to do with your leverage

Yes that is possible… if you can continuously monitor your trades.

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Of course it is possible - but it has nothing at all to do with low leverage whatsoever. It is just an open risk and the same risk per trade whatever leverage you use.

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yes yes if you are a serious trader why not just keep an eye on all the trades and forex news happening around world

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So are we to believe that all "serious" traders never sleep at all, they just stare at their screens with one eye and read the news non-stop with the other and never use stops because they have low leverage???

This is not only fiction it is very dangerous fiction to inexperienced traders.

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But keeping eyes on the screen all the time is practically not good. It is time consuming and stressful. That is why they invented SL. LOL haha :stuck_out_tongue:

yea use stop loss in case you wan to…

Whether a beginner or an experienced trader, stop-loss as per me is a great strategy. I’m actually not a risk taker and love my money a lot. So, I make sure to put the stop-loss each time before the market moves in the opposite direction and I end up losing.