Respectfully, Adam, that may eventually be suicidal for your account. Nobody can realistically afford position-sizes up to 10% of their bankroll.
It’s [I]extremely[/I] unlikely that it can be sensible for you to expose more than 2% of your account to risk on any individual trade. On that basis, if you want a 100-pip stop-loss, then with an account of £1,000, you need 100 pips to represent a maximum of £20, which in turn means that your appropriate position-sizes should be a maximum of 20p (not £1!) per pip.
When I first started trading, I needed £1,000 desposited in my account for every £1-per-pip of position-sizing, but my [I][U]maximum[/U][/I] stop-loss was [B][U]20[/U][/B] pips, not 100 pips. You’re clearly in a very different position from that.
A re-think/re-appraisal on the above issue is needed, before you start!
Regarding trailing stops, my own opinion is that in general, for most systems, [I][U]most[/U][/I] of the time, they lose money. I have several different reasons for believing this …
(i) When I tested my own five little systems, only one of them gained from a trailing stop: the others all lost;
(ii) In other forums, when I’ve occasionally made this comment, I’ve always had some “Good heavens - you’re right!” comments from people who have methodically backtested it for the first time and realised that they were more profitable without the trailing stop;
(iii) [B][U]All[/U][/B] the authors whose textbooks I really respect and whose opinions have proven right and beneficial to me in other areas seem fairly opposed to trailing stops. Authors like Linda Bradford Raschke explain in their books in more detail than I can, in a forum-post, why they’re such a bad idea, overall.
They always look and sound attractive and appealing, but it’s very easy to lose count of the times a trade starts off doing well and then retraces a bit (just enough to take out the trailing stop, which has of course moved during the initial phase of the trade), before continuing on its merry way in the “right direction”. So the times that trailing stops cost money tend to be “opportunity cost” money, i.e. you make less than you might have done, i.e. they’re profitable trades anyway (often) which is why one doesn’t always “notice” as much as one would if one were looking at actual losses.
I’m not, myself, willing to use automated trailing stops in the absence of [B]really[/B] clear-cut, statistically valid proof that they’re better than other methods.
