the tighter the better?

[jezza888]

I read one of the posts by Mr Charts in the 'US day traders threads' the other day where he stated that he has extremely tight stops.

I trade intraday cable using a 30 and 15min chart and always kept my stops around 30 to 40 pips due to the volitility of the market and to allow the trade to grow!

After reading Mr Charts post it bugged me for days that I'd like to keep it that tight but never could. Always one of those newbie things I suppose. "it will come back into profit.... It will, no its -30, -35 and out" I wasnt that confident so went back to the drawing board and did some tests and dry runs for a few days and realised he was right.

Even on volitile movers like Nasdaq stocks and forex, If my trade goes against me by 10 to 15 that's it, I know its wrong, I allow another 5 for spread and the factor of usind SB's. I move my SL to BE now after about 15 pips also where as before I'd wait so much longer. Its made such a difference to my balance.

Curious to how close others keep their stops?

 

[badtrader]

the tighter the better?

Agree and most men would .Then most women like it a bit wider

 

[badtrader]

Ignore me Im in a funny mood today

 

[jezza888]

Quite alright badtrader... nowt wrong with humour at work!

 

[Jyde]

It is very good to have that kind of feed-back on the issue.
When I started out, I was constantly stopped out (quite normal for beginners, I assume). After about half a year of trading, I thought I found the holy grail: Give the market room. Yes, I gave it wider stop-losses, and lo! I started to take profits.
Well, needless to say that what I did wrong was to let more money be exposed as opposed to the logical thing, i.e. to work on my entries and timing. As time advanged, I did make a few profit, but equity was obviously at greater risk. In day-to-day terms, that meant that I had to 'run faster' to cover my losses.

So as alwasy, it's a trade off. Of course tighter is better (yes badtrader, I know... ) but not if it means you get stopped out 9 of 10.
But it is still a goal to get in with a 1 pip SL and take a million pip profit... every day!

All the best...
CJ

 

[jezza888]

Thats the thing, you need to fine tune your entries to ensure that the 9/10 will be in your favour not against. Once you've got your entries down to as tight as you can get, 15 pips should still be too far away.

 

[Splitlink]

I read one of the posts by Mr Charts in the 'US day traders threads' the other day where he stated that he has extremely tight stops.

Curious to how close others keep their stops?

I check each share to see what happened before over a period and work out where the stops should be and wait for the price to come to it. Sometimes I work on a numerical stop of so many points if I have nothing to go on and think that the price is moving my way, but that the logical place to put a stop is too far on risk terms.

There are so many enter signals that I use that I have to know when the time has come to say goodbye and get out, otherwise I could hang on with disastrous consequences.

Split