What do you do when you exit a losing trade?

First I ask was it a good loss or a bad loss? A good loss for me is when I followed my rules perfectly and the trade just loss - this doesn’t bother me at all.

If for some reason I broke my rules and lost I have been known to go to pieces - it can set up for revenge trading.

So for me losing isn’t the issue breaking the rules is.

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It will depend How Big amount you lost :stuck_out_tongue:

I prefer taking some time or a few days off if losses are huge.

I understand what you’re saying but the key is to not let losses get huge in the first place. Always use a stop-loss. Never widen your stop. Always fix your maximum loss to a small percentage of your account capital.

This is a dangerous business. You can double your money in a year if you’re good. You can lose it all this morning if you’re not.

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Well it doesn’t stop giving sadness, I take a whiskey and try again. Perseverance above all

You need to have your risk management under control before any trade. After that (and so much more); you need to move on when a loss occurs or what I look at as an opportunity that saved me money. I liken the journey toward trading psych mentality to physical pain. You can either feel the pain and suffer or mitigate your circumstances by being pro-active with cognitive-behavior pain management techniques (I’m an RNl). There are many trading psych techniques that work to train your mind & body: knowing what kind of learner you are also helps. Realizing we all respond differently is key. What works for one blah blah…and what Johnscott31 said hit the nail on the head. It’s not the size; it’s did you follow your trading plan and all that it entails (planning, writing in your journal, back-testing, risk management, frame of mind, etc…). Self talk matters. Patience…

I analyse my existing trading
strategies and develop new
strategies or adjust the existing
one’s so that i can perform
better in my next trade. Before
executing trading on live account
you can try on demo account as
it wil help you in gaining techniques
and strategies.

In case of loss of money, I try to calm down, and build a plan for future earnings.

One should add Stop loss while placing a trade as it reduces the risks while trading and protect your account from getting blown out. It is good to have this tool at times when you are not able to sit in front of the computer and monitor your trades for every second as the forex market is very volatile and a movement in seconds can change the complete scenario of the ongoing trades. A stop-loss order eliminates emotions that can impact trading decisions.

Usually in such cases it is very difficult to restrain emotions, but this is the main thing that needs to be done. At least this greatly affects the results of the work.

Got me horse racing again -

A good value loser is better than a bad value winner :wink:

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In general, for a trader, the loss of money is quite an ordinary moment. the main thing - then to work out this money with successful transactions)

I have a habit of noting down everything while trading, so if such a situation occurs, I would go back and check the moves that I made and would try to evaluate which one wasn’t appropriate enough. Though I am trading quite some time and I take the responsibility of my losses too, but I avoid repeating the same mistakes again.

I think that all you should do - just accept trade and exit it, withput regrets. It’s the most important think each trader should learn. No reason to feel regrets, that’s just your work.

When we are trading we have to look at a lot of variables in the markets. Only when we will see a positive sign we must start our trading.

I always try to analyze my mistake and make the right conclusions that may help me in the future. To do this, you need to keep a trading journal, without which more than one trader can not trade. But you do not need to take your mistakes too seriously, and not to focus on them gently, take them as a new experience and continue trading.

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Completely agree with this.

Good advice, right there!

@Eroedon

I’m not suggesting that analysing mistakes is bad at all, but some beginners may think that all losses are mistakes - which is clearly untrue.

You can do everything right and still lose.

And you can do everything wrong and still win.

This is one of the reasons why trading can be so confusing

But you are absolutely correct in that you shouldn’t beat yourself up about mistakes made, it only reinforces more of them.

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New traders put far too much emphasis on the losers.

Much of this behaviour is driven by the education styles we encounter in our schools as children. So we equate each trade with a question in a test. In a test, if we get only 11 questions right out of 20, we’re not doing very well. And no doubt the teacher will sit down and we’ll go over those questions we got wrong, over and over and over, until we get most or all of them right. There’s nothing they can do about changing this behaviour, they’re only teachers.

Meanwhile, in the real world, the trader takes 20 trades. 9 of them are losers and each one costs 1% of their account capital. But 11 of them are winners and they make a profit of 1.5% of their account capital. So in 20 trades they made a profit of 7.6%. (believe me or work it out yourself)

Now if that trader only trades 20 days per month and only trades once per day, they are going to more than double their account in a year. What teacher doubles their salary in a year?

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@tommor

Mate I like to think of myself as a deep thinker but hadn’t thought of that - but completely true!!

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