How To Stop Losing On Winning Trade

Trading Without Stop Loss Orders Is A Recipe For Disaster

Learn from this simple forex blog outline forex trading tips that how to stop losing on winning trade. Stop-Loss orders are an important ingredient to trading successfully. Understanding the importance of limiting losses and letting profits run centers around the use of stop-loss orders. No one can ever know, with 100% certainty, when a market is going to turn against a position or how fast.

The key to successfully making a business out of trading is to properly manage your money and your risk. Your money and risk go hand in hand.

For example, in managing your money you need to look at how much you have in your account and then plan on only risk a small percentage of it on any given trade. If the trade goes against you by this certain percentage, you must exit the trade.

For most traders, they find it hard to exit a losing trade in hopes that it will recover and turn out a winner instead. More often than not, sadly, the loss gets worse and the account takes a bigger hit. Many times, this ends up wiping out the account and putting the trader out-of-business.

In order to implement a proper money and risk managing scenario, the trader needs to be disciplined to accept the small loss and get out. The problem that often arises is that decision making starts to get a bit foggy for many traders as they watch the prices moving up and down, and the decision to exit is often being second guessed or questioned during the trade.

To help in regards to this problem that most traders have, the risk must be assessed and the price to exit must be planned BEFORE the trade is initiated. Once the trade is active, a stop-loss order should be placed at the predetermined price level and not moved except when the plan calls for moving it towards and into profit, not the other direction.

Why You Should Develop A Stop Loss Trading Strategy

Developing of a stop-loss trading strategy is one of the most important question in the trading life of every active trader. A correctly developed trading strategy helps to protect earned profit and to avoid dramatic losses that could wipe out all investments. There are several factors that define the main rules by which a stop-loss trading strategy is developed.

Stop-loss trading strategy is one of the most popular topics among traders. There is no doubt about importance of this question. A trader may have ten winning trades in a row, still, one loss could wipe out whole earned profit if there were no strategy placed to protect the profit and limit losses. A selection of a stop-loss strategy looks simple from the first view. However, when it comes to a practical implementation, a lot of traders become confused by realizing that it is not as easy as it looks like and it could be even more complicated than generate trading signals. In many cases a good trading system could fail if a stop-loss strategy is not used correctly and a bad trading system could be profitable if a smart stop-loss strategy is used.

A selection of stop-loss strategy is a complicated task mainly because it depends on many factors. Some of these factors are trader's risk tolerance, selected trading vehicle, trading style, forex market behavior, etc...

Risk Tolerance
There are different traders on the forex market. There are conservative and risky players, there are retired people and there are young traders. Everybody have different risk level and in many cases a stop-loss strategy depends on the personal preferences of a trader.

Trading style
Different traders trade differently. One trader makes 5 trades during a single session and another trader makes only one trade a year. Respectfully, the first trader could be looking for tight stop-loss strategy while the second trader could be looking for flexible, less strict stop-loss.

Trading Vehicle
You may trade forex, stocks, options, futures and with any of these tools you would be looking for a different stop-loss. While a forex trader could be looking for constant stop-loss level, an options trader may select two dimensional stop-loss strategy (price and time: the longer you stay in position the tighter stop-loss become).

Forex Market Behavior
The forex market changes constantly. Today you may see quiet peaceful up-trend; in month you could be in the volatile, scary decline. Depending on market volatility a trader may select different trading strategies: tighter during quiet markets and more risky during volatile periods.

These are only a few factors that affect selection of a stop-loss trading strategy. Every trader should come to this question very seriously. There is not a lot of information about that and in many cases a trader has to learn and develop a stop-loss system by using his/her own trading experience.

Why Use Stop Losses Orders

Stop orders can be very helpful in the forex market. And I believe they are accentual to anyone looking to trade the markets.

It can help you to limit your losses when you are wrong and keep your gains when you are right. Many new investors will fail because they do not utilize this order.

So what is stop loss orders. A Stop loss order is typically used as a closing order to limit your losses or lock in your profits on a long or short position. But they can also be used to open a position. Stop Loss: Triggers a market order (buy or sell) when market price hits the stop price.

So why should you use it?

Limit Your Losses
The most important part of trading is limiting your losses.  If you lose all of your money on 1 bad trade it doesn’t matter how good of a stock picker you are.  You need to have at least some money to make money from it.

Another great reason why limiting your losses is a good idea is because the less you lose when you are wrong the less often you will have to be right to make money in the market.

So how do you use stop orders to limit your losses?  Well you simply place the order to sell the forex at a lower price.  For example if you buy a forex market at $20 and you feel like it is a good buy unless it dips below a support level at $18 you could put a stop around $17 and that way if it does fall lower you will get out at $17 for a small loss instead of waiting for it to $!6 or $15 and beyond.

Stop-loss orders help to take your emotions out of the trade. If you can discipline yourself to keep the stop-loss in play and not remove or move it (except towards profit territory), you then do not have to concern yourself with foggy reasoning during those times the market is not moving in your favor.

Wise advice is to let your profits run and keep your losses small. Stop-loss orders are powerful tools for allowing you to do this. While they help you keep your losses small, they also can be used to trail your position as it goes into profit, allowing the trade to accumulate profits as long as the market does not change trend. At some point it will and then your trailing stop-loss order is hit and you are out with your profits.

How To Stop Losing On Winning Trade