Pharaoh
Brigadier General
- Messages
- 20,304
Beginners should not forget the use of stop loss. It helps a lot to them to manage accounts in bad situations that they are not ready for. After some experience they can do trading without stop loss. What they feel appropriate they can add tools in.
A lot of experienced traders did very badly during the most recent SNB-CHF event. I personally took some unpleasant losses during an earlier surprise SNB intervention while I was testing an EA which didn't use stoplosses.
Since then, the only time I've ever skipped using hard stops was during some minimal leverage swing trades that lasted over 1 year. In the end, I'd have come out far better if I had put hard stops in place.
I can't think of one legitimate reason to not have a hard stop on each and every trade. If you don't trust your broker, put an emergency stop twice as far out as your mental stop (assuming you use a reasonable level of risk in your mental stop) while you look for a broker which won't hunt your stops.