The intra day forex market is full of noise that it becomes difficult for new traders to understand where to put the stop loss. There is so much noise in the forex markets in the short run that prices tend to jump 10-20 pips for no apparent reason.
Most of the new forex traders get frustrated to find their stop loss being constantly tripped due to noise even when the market is going in the anticipated direction.
A static 10-20 pip stop loss is an arbitrary choice many traders make. Many new traders also use Trailing Stop Loss. Place your trailing stop loss too close and you will find your stop hit too early. Place it too far and you will have to forgo potential profits if the price retraces.
The actual reality is this that many professional forex traders do use stop loss but mostly place it on their computers making it invisible from their brokers. A better method to place a stop loss is by using a dynamic level that changes as the market rate changes.
Stop hunting is something the brokers are continuously doing. If a broker finds many stop losses at a particular price level on his price feed; he can easily trip them using a momentary blip in the price. You cant even complain. The momentary spike happened due to a sudden large transaction in the market.
More often than not, professional traders, trade with a stop loss at all, only keeping a mental stop loss. But you will need a lot of experience to trade this way.
Moving Averages, Bollinger Bands, SARs etc can be easily used as dynamic stop losses by you. It is a good way to manage your risk while letting the currency markets to do what it wants.
The more experience you will develop as a forex trader the more you are going to understand that placing fixed stop losses actually hurts more. Using fixed stop losses can hurt you more emotionally, psychologically and profit wise than help you.
You should not try to trade before or after a major economic news release. You should not try to place stop loss close to or at round numbers. And you should also not try to trade in times of thin liquidity in the currency markets.
Stop hunting is something that you should know. Many forex brokers pry on new traders and keep on tripping their stop losses terming it market noise.
