I was talking with a relatively new day trader last night at my twice-monthly trader meetups here in Colorado. We were chatting about stop losses. Or more specifically, his inability to stick to his “mental stop loss levels.”
As you can imagine, this was leading to him taking occasional big losses – which were wiping out good runs in the market.
He’d make a few hundred bucks several days in a row. He’d then lose it all (and then some) on one bad trade.
A lightbulb went off in his head when I reframed the importance of not taking big losses. No doubt many of you are shaking your heads and uttering – duh!
But for this gentleman, it took me breaking it down this way for him to get the picture: [Read more…]