Welcome to today’s entry into my Forex trading blog. I got stopped out of this trade early, it never should have gone down like it did. Read on to see how this trade played out.
I didn’t do a full analysis this morning, rather I just looked at the pairs to see if I could find something I liked. This has overall been trending up, but had a sharp drop at the end of the day yesterday. That drop took price to the lower Bollinger Band and took RSI into overbought territory.
Looking at it now, price seems to be coming out of overbought territory on the 1 hour chart, and looks like it could return it’s move to the upside (downward pressure looks exhausted on the 4h chart as well). I left this alone for a while because I didn’t see much of a pattern, but now at 11:25(ish) I see a pretty clean bull pullback. I’m setting orders and heading to get my haircut and hoping for the best.
Entry – 96.73
Stop – 96.58
Target – 97.18
R:R – 3
Entry – 96.73
It took a little bit of time, but close to an hour after setting my orders, price pushed up and triggered my entry in to the trade.
Exit – 96.646
This is so frustrating. Price was strong for a few hours after my entry got triggered, reaching about 8 pips in profit. It made a small pullback from there, and things still looked good. I was done working for the day, and had already had a trailing stop set so I wasn’t looking at the chart; but in the afternoon, I got a notification that my stop loss had been triggered.
I opened the chart to see what happened, and the pullback wasn’t that deep. With a trailing stop set, slippage came in and my stop was triggered despite price not really ever dropping down that low. Hell, the candle that this trade closed on didn’t even wick down to my closing priceā¦
Even worse, a couple hours after triggering my exit, price pushed back up into profit; ultimately getting within 9 pips of my take-profit. This should’ve been a win. If I didn’t use a trailing stop, and I actively managed this trade, I would have at the very least broken even, I think. I don’t love using the trailing stop, but sometimes I’m not going to be at the computer, so I have to.
And, truthfully, there’s nothing that says it was definitely the trailing stop that was the reason I was stopped out early. If I had been adjusting my stop manually, that still could have happened. Who knows. I just know that I want to actively manage my trades more often, and use a trailing stop as a last resort.
Again, back when I was at my most successful with the prop firm, I didn’t use trailing stops, I just checked the charts periodically (even overnight sometimes), so maybe I get back to that practice.
Either way, it wasn’t a full loss, and my analysis and direction were good, so I can’t be too upset about the trade itself, I’m just upset about the result. Moving on.
Thanks for reading! Has slippage ever ruined a trade for you? Let me know about it in the comments. And stay tuned for more Forex market trades and analysis!