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daily trading charts

Author: currencycollege
Keywords: 4x forex trading currency
Added: January 18, 2008

http://www.informedtrades.com/
A lesson on how to traders use trailing stops when trading the stock, futures, and forex markets.

In yesterday’s lesson we talked about some of the psychological difficulties people have with letting their profits run and introduced the concept of the trailing stop as one way traders can overcome these difficulties that are the downfall of so many traders.

As we spoke about briefly in yesterday’s lesson, once a position has begun to move in a traders favor many successful trader’s will manage that position through the use of what is known as a trailing stop. The simplest type of trailing stop is what is known as a fixed trailing stop which simply moves along behind a position as that position begins to move in the traders favor. The beauty of the fixed trailing stop, is that while it will move up behind a long position or down behind a short position as the position moves in the traders favor, if at any time the position begins to move against the trader, the stop does not move, essentially locking in a large portion of the gains the trader has made up to that point.

Let’s say for example that you had been following the trend in the EUR/USD chart below which started back in August and were looking for an opportunity to get into a trade. Based on your analysis you decided that if the market broke out above the little resistance point that I have highlighted on the chart below and the ADX was in a good position that you were going to enter long at 1.4360 to try and ride the trend. To manage the trade if it moved in your favor you placed a 100 Point trailing stop on the position at 1.4260. Now in this example if the market moved against you from the start 100 points your stop at 1.4260 would not have moved and you would have been executed on that order when the market touched 1.4260. As you can see from the chart below however, in this example the market did not pull back but went higher. As our stop is a 100 point trailing stop once the market moved up from 1.4360 the stop is going to continue to move up remaining 100 points behind the current price. If the market moves down however the stop does not move. So in this example once the market stoped moving higher at 1.4752 so did our stop and since the market pulled back 100 points from that level we were stopped out in this example at 1.4652.

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