I wasn’t using stop losses at very start of my trading career but back then I had many accounts getting margin call for this reason. After a long hard journey I realized that using stop loss is very necessary and after that my accounts never had margin calls.
Because that’s one if the most important risk management (at least the trader could cut their losses, they may use no stop losses)
You can trade without a stop loss, but it is quite risky. Thus it would be able to use other methods, eg cut loss, locking, switching. So it remains safe from the risk that a lot.
I try to use stop loss mostly in my trading .It is a best tool to manage your trading and risk.We not bear more loss than e are prepared before. If I do not use it i have to monitor trades continuously so that any point not be dangerous .I will close position at proper market move.
Yes I use.
Setting up stop losses and take profits are the primary objectives that every trader focus before starting forex, don’t know how anyone can skip stop loss while trading…
I am currently figuring out the MT4 platform through a demo account and make trades but using stop losses in a correct way seems to be an art itself.
But I do believe they are necessary as you dont want to blow all your money when the market goes against you.
I prefer to use stop loss because anything can happen - the power might go out, or my Internet connection might disappear, and I would lose control, if briefly, over my positions. I feel more secure this way.
It is important to use stoploss if you do not want to lose your money
How much powerful your trading strategy is that doesn’t matter, you have to use stop loss trading tool obviously! Avoiding stop loss trading tool means, you are using 100% risk reward ratio for your every single trade, that’s really horrible! In my live account I use various types of SLs according to the trading styles!
It’s always prudent to use a stop loss. It’s a control tool that if used appropriately and depending on the circumstances can lower your trading risk. So to answer the question, yes, I use stop loss.
I like this post from Vic. I am an advocate of SL, as seen in my previous post. I think it is important to clarify that Stop Loss cannot be arbitrary, you have to have a reason for placing a stop at a particular price. I think it is easy to say stop loss protects, etc as the brokers describe because they profit directly from the stops. However, stop losses are not guaranteed in extreme market moves (EURCHF), you will still lose your entire account.
All things in perspective I guess. On the other hand if you use them and put them at 25 ticks in a market that is extremely volatile, then you only have yourself to blame if you are unfairly exited out of a good trade. It is best not to have any pre-conceptions of risk or trader behaviour around risk. This restricts you from exploring. E.g. If I have a million pounds and chose to sit in a position without a stop, then clearly leverage is not an issue, the chances I get wiped are slim, I may not even need the leverage, leverage is the real issue. On the other hand, an average trader with 1 or 2k needs leverage or trade too small a size to even contemplate a stop loss. If you need leverage and use too much then a stop is essential. Well, from a broker stand point this kind of trader will always lose money.
It is quite simply, in order to really take advantage of leverage in a volatile environment you will have to accommodate more risk. In that way you start behaving like a market maker. This is hugely the case in the interbank and stock Options market making arena. So the biggest factor remains volatility. If it is flat you only need to call direction, when it is extreme you are at higher risk, here is were stops come in. They can save you on those rare occasion when volatility increases beyond historical levels. So in effect a stop is the maximum you can lose, if volatility exceeds its historical benchmark.
That’s my take anyway and that’s why I can comfortably say none of it matters at all.
If one keeps a mental stop loss why not have a real one at that level? Am I missing something if you sl gets tagged in you are wrong on your trading idea and that plan is no longer valid. Time to get out and re analyse what price is doing.
not always. stop loss gets triggered at the very low of your trading idea. it can hit your stop loss and hurry up into ur direction withib minutes. sometimes the market volatility makes stop losses counterproductive.
the problem is stop losses made too tight.
i stopped using any stop losses a while ago. since then i have a score rate of 90%. before that it was 75% and most of the failed trades happemed cause i got stopped out on high market volatility.
Ok I understand what you are saying I considered that but I think only with real trading experience over time one can learn to manage a mental stop at these points during high volatility. I know most noobies would get hammered that one looser they didn’t want to close. Maybe I’m talking from personal experience also. :17:
That surely proves that your stops were too tight, [I]not that you shouldn’t be using them at all[/I]?
Sudden, unexpected outages of web-connections and electricity supplies are not unknown, hello.
It costs [U]nothing[/U] to include at least a [I]disaster-stop[/I] automatically with every trade you ever enter.
Beyond that, with absolutely no offence to anyone, this really is such a no-brainer that it’s quite surprising to find a 10-page thread discussing the subject (even though the thread is a decade old!). 
no it doesnt. it only shows that you and i trade differently. and a “nobrainer” is to critizise something you dont understand out of your point of view as “daytrader” or “scalper”. 
stop losses combined with the idea (which brokers are spreading) to make fast and easy 20 pips in the markets is what causes the biggest losses of newbie traders.
the stop loss gives them a false security. in fact they first should learn to trade in bigger time frames with smaller sizes and then scale down to the 20 pips cr@p brokers are spreading.
if it works good for you its very nice but trust me the automated stop losses are a money maker machine for brokers as people loose a lot of money willpower encouragement and self-trust while they try to learn this very unimportant feature of a brokers platform.
yes power problems. pay your elecricity bill and problem solved 
you have:
compute
smartphone (if charged at least to 3%)
tablets
and in worst case you have a phone with which you can call your broker and instruct him to close all trades because in london was a 8.0 eathquacke and you got no smartphone ecetricity and no mobile internet.
fixed home phones function still if your house has no elecricity as the fixed phone network has its own elecricity supply centralized and independed from your houses elecricity.
power or web shortages? i had that the last time when former yugoslavia broke up and started a civil war. maybe your location where you live needs to invest in its infrastructure?
but one thing i can assure you: as long as you rely on stop losses (mentaly or psychologically) for your trades to not brake your account you are far from a trader that makes [B]the[/B] money. yes, making a living maybe but not [B]the[/B] money.
Excellent point, Turbo.
Certainly, one’s trading perspectives, and constraints, affects both how one uses stops and whether one needs to use them at all. For example, at one extreme we have my neighbour who has held his shares portfolio for decades, hardly ever changes anything in it and spends even less time even thinking about it. If I would ask him about his stop loss policy, his eyes would glaze over as he pondered what language this strange foreigner was now speaking and if he grasped even the very idea of what I was talking about he would immediately suspect some new scheme by the government to get at his savings! 
Additionally, in my days in institutional banking we didn’t have “stops” we had funds that had to be invested somewhere. If they were not invested in “A” then they were invested in “B” or held in cash, etc.
But in both examples we are not talking about leveraged exposure with money that does not actually exist. But even in the world of institutional banking there are abundant examples of multiple-million losses arising from imprudent dealings in financial derivitives.
If one trades long term positions, with long term objectives, and backed with plenty of capital to absorb and ride through anticipated adverse periods along the way, then stops are not necessary. But even in these scenarios there is a need to identify how and when one decides that the objectives are no longer valid and it is time to quit and think again. This kind of decision-making is, I guess, how your 10% loss trades occur. Which is an impressive statement of your trading skills. But it may be that the depth of the kind of adverse twists and turns that a long term trader accepts are sufficicient to wipe out a small account.
But this site is primarily intended for Newbies. And most of those (according to their posts) are starters, learners, and have very limited capital. We have heard from at least one trader on this site how he is still carrying small, long term positions that have been negative by even thousands of pips. How could most of the Newbies here carry that kind of position - or even want to? Even if it does “come right” after a few years?
I think everyone would agree that short-term trading is far more difficult in terms of consistent profitability, but it is all most Newbies can carry in their early stages - and also gives a lot more experience than watching one micro lot for 6 months?
But if one trades short term then risk and money management are super-critical and cannot allow the potential of a sudden turnaround that wipes out a week’s trading or, even worse, a total small account. In this kind of trading, a damage limitation strategy using stops is surely imperative?
Hello from that trader holding negative trades for long periods 
Manxx, here I am
Excellent posts from Lexys, Emeraldorc, Turbo, and Manxx!
We all trade differently and I am probably in the minority in the way I operate… I think I could not use stop losses in my kind of trading because it is like that institutional trading where you ‘park’ money in positions and monitor them rather than micromanage them…
Manxx discussed this in one of the Forextown threads, saying that my kind of trading (unlike Lexys, for example) does not constitute a source of revenue, nor am I risking money that I cannot afford to lose; however, I would much rather trade real money than paper money, because I am practising a way to buy into long-term capital management for later years…
I too can be hit by big events, but, for example, Brexit volatility has not killed me: what it did is it substantially changed the balance of time versus profitability in my portfolio, and I felt obliged to take some additional short-term trades to take advantage of certain movements as well as to further capitalise.
The long-term positioning I do is something that Newbie traders could actually benefit from learning about, at least conceptually, rather than only focusing on the ‘manual HFT’ that is so commonplace; however, the promise of quick returns is why the crowds of us Newbies all started with fast trading with stop losses and fixed R/R systems… Certainly, what Yohec and Eddieb do is probably a very good compromise between faster validation and more medium-term positioning (see the ‘Balls of Steel’ thread in Forextown).
Whatever works for you…there is no ONE kind of trading… From my part, I wish I had a trader to learn from, because learning from a pro would be so much more beneficial than swimming in the dark for years…Very few people can learn how to speak a new language or how to play a musical instrument well enough without some formal.or informal mentorship…and the same is true of trading, yet the myth is fed to us all that by reading a few books and hanging around on Google we can somehow become proficient at this, all by ourselves…
Losing control over my trades due to a technology failure like this is one of my biggest fears, to be honest. Once it did become a reality, I lost my internet connection due to a power outage caused by a lightning strike. I had to run with my laptop to a near wifi spot - which wasn’t all that near - to see what was happening. This is why I always use a stop loss now.