Is it good to use a trailing stop?

Beginner Questions
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i know you weren’t asking me, so please excuse me for interfering!

for what it’s worth, if anything, i offer my own answer to that question

i have four reasons (listed below very much in order of importance!) why it isn’t ok for me to use a trailing stop

  1. every single time i’ve ever tested it, over the decades (and i’ve really done a lot of backtesting and forward-testing of trailing stops, because superficially they seem so attractive!), i’ve found that everything i’ve ever done has performed better, overall, without an automated trailing stop than with one

  2. all my previous colleagues, many of them very successful traders, have found the exact same thing

  3. all the authors of trading textbooks i trust (that’s not many!) have explained that that’s so, too, and some have explained why

  4. counterparty market-maker brokers who win when you lose absolutely love their customers to use trailing stops and they promote, facilitate and encourage them at every possible opportunity

for me, the bottom line here is that because they sometimes seem to work well, it’s very easy indeed, without meticulous and accurate testing, to lose track of all the times that an automated trailing stop moves up with your long trade (or down with your short one) just enough to take you out on a reversal before the price then continues in “your” direction

i often trail a stop-loss manually beyond the most recently-formed swing high/low, but that’s a totally different matter, and not one that can be automated - like almost everything else that’s good, in trading, it requires care and attention and work, and involves avoiding automation

as i said, sorry for interfering!

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