Trading Without a StopLoss

Too late......cuchuflito already said that..(above my post)

seems a worn question and you can easily find hundreds of answers everywhere.
What does it mean by trading without a STOP? You need not set a SL right at the entrance of a trade, or at any moment during the position's time.
The question is do you want to EXIT the trade ever in your life?
If the answer is yes, then it becomes a little complicated and that's called trading (in this particular forex context at least). When you exit a trade, you either lose or win some pips or dollars or an equivalence. When you win it's called a take profit, other times can be a SL.
Now what, do you expect never a loss? Then you are dreaming.
So by itself it's a contradiction in your trading strategy or mind having no SL.

Now forget the philosophy and jump right down to the biz: if you don't ever set SL, or just for a particular trade, you'll have to exert all your means to monitor it in order to quit at the right time. That's all.
Setting SLs is in fact easier, a lot than not having one, by that sense. I don't say setting SLs is easy. It's worth to start a new thread about how to set SLs and I'd be happy to join you.

Almost all businesses borrow money at some point or another. I you don't get loans, or issue stocks or bonds, you are restricted in growth almost inevitably.
Managing the borrowed money is important. Poor management of this can lose the business.

The question is "Are fixed stop losses the best way to handle the debt"?

Forex is inherently a high-risk market.

If I knew how to add a motto at the bottom of my posts (any one want to help me there?) I would probably write this:

A margin call is a terrible thing!

I trade without a stop loss. When I write the same thing three years from now, that should give you a pretty good idea.

Gambling against trend is why it happened. Ask yourself why you do it when the trend was clearly to see.

Hi "Beginner Joe" : are you an old trader !
Your answer is coming out from someone who knows well the tester outputs and "the sever drop in balance due to sever drop in equity". !!

After some years of trading, now i tend to gravitate towards trend trading.As in trend following we need to place SL's to protect equity. I had some pro tader in his PDF that we need to work in trading. When i looked deeeper of what he meant his trading is like the series of this.
Protrader series : w;w;w;w;w;l;l;l;w;l;l;l;l;l;l;l;l;w;l;l;l;l;l;l;l;l;l;w;l;l
Lets say his average sl is 20 - 50 p so each time he loses he needed more wins or better r;r to compensate for loss equity. He had to day trade everyday ,catching pips , looking for opportunity several hours a day.

My series : l;l;l;l;l;l;w;l;l;l;w;l;l;l;l;l;l;l;lw
That is not exact but to give you some idea how i trade.With each loss i trade the SL get slightly bigger and bigger. Eventually the losses get bigger but happen less and less frequently. SL is a pain...but getting stop frequently is worse. Mine is set initially ATR/ 2 so its 50 pip at least for most pairs. I didnt even use candlestick ,indicator or Price action. That is so subjective always incur more headaches. The reward? The one winning trade wipes out the losses before with some profit. The profit depends on how greedy i am. The bigger the sl the less time spent to check the trades. The longest series of trade ending up in win overall is 1 and half months. The Sl is hit many times but ended up in wins. I didnt even martingale the trades so all trade is using fixed lot. If i wanted to increase the lot in the series, i would only increase 1.5 times lot max. But i never needed this. Compared to the day trader this is less stressful .Imagine the pressure waiting for trades,hitting the Sl many times doing five days a week, mental breakdown is not that far fetched.

I tend to not use SL since my opposite trades acts like one. BUt should i decided to use hard SL i could do that too. The result are not really different. No problem. The only problem occur when sideways market hit, which i will get a solution in place. Soon i coult integrate the trend following method with sideways market method. But with current market you have to put more bias with trend following without forgetting about range trading. In my experience with range trading some trades can go about floating for years. Trend following trades tend to finish in about 2 months max. This is a lesson i learned for a long time. Took years to sink in. But if you master both you can trade any pair any market.
I just couldnt stand how a day trader could wrestle with wins and losses daily, this guys can have losing weeks,losing month or year.

The only way you can trade without any stop out or SL is to trade ranging pairs,,,trade it until it stopped ranging then move to other pairs. I also hate the length of time to achieve total overall profit.

A graphic representation of forex trading in general ?

There's nothing wrong in drop in balance. The problem is the trader doesn't know how to increase balance. This is the advice I can give to people: it doesn't matter balance drop, so long as you know how to make balance increase. To make balance increase is simple: when trend up, buy; when trend down sell.

It's very dangerous without money management.

If you trade without a stop loss, and stubbornly hang on to a poor trade no matter what, you will experience a margin call.

I Feel sorry for your loss. If such a loss happened to me, I would be devastated!

It is the Fear of such a loss which causes me to trade with caution, and forethought, taking measure of one kind or another to avoid it.

Hence my motto. A margin call is a terrible thing!

I too, refuse to trade against what I see as the long term trend.

May I point out that if you trade so that you profit from a swap, you are surely trading with a long term trend?

I think though, that with careful thought and attention, you can do better debt management without using fixed stop losses.

There is almost always among the four pairs I observe, a pair where the long-term trend and the short term trend agree.
I think it is reasonable to seek trade entrances where this condition exists, and avoid trade entries where it does not..

There's always one that gets away. Anyone who doesn't think so hasn't lived or traded long enough.

The easiest people to take money away from are those who put their stop in the most obvious place and those who don't bother at all.
It's a given that all the little piggies that boast and squeal never come back after they've been through the sausage grinder to tell their tale of woe.

So the game goes on, and a new batch of little piggies come along to boast and squeal.

In a way, you have to love the beauty of it. Especially if you're long on sausage and there's no shortage of pigs.

I am fairly new to trading, but one of the first things I realized is, trading without sound money management is financial russian roulette. And there is no sound money management without the use of stop losses.

I don't see stop losses as a hindrance to trading, quite the opposite. Stop losses are a phenomenal tool: they let you preset the exact amount of risk you're willing to take on any given trade. Now why would I want to get rid of that?!
I also found that using stop losses forces you to carefully consider your trade before entering it - where do I set my stop loss? why? where is my stop loss in relation to the entry point I'm considering? what is my upside (i.e. risk/reward)? should I even reconsider entering this trade?
Setting the stop loss is not everything, you have to be disciplined and stick to your decision. Only ever move the stop loss in the direction of your trade (up for long, down for short), else you're just lying to yourself and your stop loss is just for show, and you might as well not have set one in the first place.
Sure, sometimes my stop losses get busted. Maybe I got hunted out, or maybe I set it too close to a support/resistance, or maybe I flat out misread the trade. Shit happens. But when it happens, I still feel in control and at peace, because it was a planned contingency.

What's the alternative? Mental stop losses? Huh-huh.. Okay, this trade is going the wrong way, I'll get out at the next uptick.. oh wait, I'm sooo close to break even, let's wait it out a little longer.. oh shit.. okay, when it comes back to that previous high I'm really getting out this time.. oh crap.. now what?
You get the picture.

I won't even mention hedging/grid systems/martingales which are monstrosities that are sure to leave you broke (unless you have unlimited funds, but then, why would you be trading?). The only proper hedging would involve using put/call options (butterflies, etc.) in relation to the underlying assets, but these are actually risk-management tools that in fact resemble the use of stop-losses.

Stops are only ONE form of MM. There are more ways to trade than simply betting on a direction from a fixed price position and hoping it goes your way until it doesn't.

OK, I'll bite.

Which other ways are there to trade than simply betting on a direction?

If you draw down, you're a sucker.

If you can't see direction, you're a loser.

If you hedge, you're simply putting off the inevitable truth that you are a sucker who can't see direction.

What other choices are there?

There are other ways. If you want them, go find them yourself. Correct way of trading resembles a normal business that has to deal with fluctuating prices.

Betting red or black and waiting to see if you have won is not trading. That's called gambling. Withdrawing the bet half way through the spinning of the wheel, via a stop loss, is not money management. It is gambling on the original gamble. Gamble + gamble = gamble. Gamblers are losers because the house edge ensures it that way.

A real trader don't need to know if it's going up or going down. But he does need to know it's going up then it's going down.

Gambling is not knowing your market.

So explain these "other ways" to trade instead of spouting sanctimonious crap.

If you have a real answer.

Real businessman don't reveal his trade secrets. This is what business is all about.

If you do so well from gambling, why do you need to know other ways ?

This is a cop out and complete bullshit.

This is my business. I can talk freely about it.

And where did the talk about gambling come from anyway?

You.

Please stop.

Some sense comes back into the thread.

Surely the object is to capture a move from point a to point b.and if your wrong minimise your loss.

Im quite aware of large positions being hedged for exposure and interest rate changes ect.but this is not the same thing as some of you have manafactured some bizarre idea that multiple hedged positions and crazy floating losses is a longterm possibility.

Stops are not a target for defeat. They merely protect risk.on a account with a ceiling. In the unlikly event that we find ourselves with no time restriction and endless account size its not possible. You may be lucky for a while but nothing more.

Playing red or black is gambling. Does anyone disagree ? (careful, i am setting up a trap here)