Bitcoin Forum

I remember when I hit my first stop loss.

It took a lot of pain to convince me that I needed to use stop losses. It's a good thing at that time I was playing with money I could afford to lose, because I would throw a little bit of BTC at different projects and watch in agony as the coins bled away into obscurity. 💉

Still though, my portfolio bleeding away from a little bit of play money to almost no money was nothing compared to the feeling of getting stopped out and price rocketing straight to the moon a few seconds later. 🚀🌖

That's the part nobody warns you about.

You find yourself in the awkward position where you were right - price was about to go up!

But you got shook out before it did and took a loss.📉

There's a million possible reasons why that happened. As you improve your skills as a trader, you'll begin to identify those situations and avoid them, but you'll never get rid of the chance completely. 📖

It took a long time for me to accept that while sometimes sticking to a stop loss hurts, the majority of the time it will save you from even greater pain. 🤕

When things go wrong in manufacturing, this phrase is often thrown around: "Your first loss is your best loss." It refers to tossing the problem product in the trash right away, instead of spending a bunch of money trying to fix it. 🗑️

Trading isn't so different. If the trade isn't going the way you thought it would, throw that trade in the trash and move on to another.

There's so many opportunities for profit in this market, seize them!

I can definitly feel you ;) I remember the time when I traded BTC in mid 2017. BTC fell from ~3600 to 3525, my stop loss was at 3530 so it triggered. But it was literally just a second BTC was that low, it immediatly turned and rocket to around 3800 letting me sit with my FIAT.

this sort of psychology is what builds market trends. it's really very classic. what you're talking about is called a "stop run"...… the market runs through a key price level where traders are likely to stop loss, then reverses hard.

sometimes whales try to facilitate this by dumping near such key levels. then they set bids below to catch the cascading stop losses. after that, all the little guys are left chasing the price higher after getting stopped out.

a really important part of trading IMO is re-taking a trade after getting stopped out, should the trade setup appear again. stop losses are crucial to limiting losses, but if you let them discourage you from taking trades again, you will miss out on lots of winners like you said!

I remember my first time paying the price for not using a stop loss. :)

I lost $3,000+ on that position, of maybe $15,000 total capital. I bought the top of a bull trap then watched the price stair step down for weeks until I eventually capitulated and sold everything.

I'm pretty sure I made a few more mistakes like that before realizing stop losses were crucial to my future as a trader. Like they say, this learning process is "paying tuition" as you learn how trade properly and pay the price for your mistakes. In a sense, we depend on other traders making these mistakes so we can profit.

We all have that experience in trading because many of us have a use stop loss in the trading, especially if the price is suddenly get down deeper.
It attracts us to sell bitcoin at that price but then the price increase higher, and we don't expect to see the higher price.
But that will be a good lesson for us because we need to learn more about trading, how we can analyze the chart so we can predict for the price movements.
We need to practice over and over so we can decide in a short time and we prevent the losses that we might get.

Panic and not yet aware of the market situation and situation, made me do CL for the first time.
at first I was satisfied because I had done CL. but I feel sorry when the price goes back up quickly shortly after I do the CL.

Same bro, I once felt that when the price touched the SL then the price returned to skyrocket it was very painful. But in my opinion it's the best than we lose more money, because we ourselves cannot predict how long the market will touch the lowest point.
In my trading experience, the most painful thing was that when I didn't install the SL and the price went down, wow it hurts.

I remember when I start trading and I didn't know what I was doing. I was following the advice of some random dude who actually didn't know what he was doing too. And I didn't use a stop loss because the dude told me so. You can imagine the result was disastrous.

After some time I decided never to trade without a stop loss. And I still follow this rule. Even if the stop loss level gets hit, it is OK because I trade no more than 2% of the funds I have allocated for trading. One wrong decision no longer means a disaster for me.

Now to the question. What time frame did you trade? On the lower time frames the thing you describe (bull traps or bear traps, essentially) can happen more often than on the higher time frames.

It's a bad feeling but it's inevitable. And I think that everyone remembers the first loss and how bitter it tasted.
But with time you learn that from time to time you can't avoid it but it's very important how you deal with loss and do you manage to recover it and move on. To my opinion that is the most important. And with time you also learn to estimate the risk and not to make foolish decision. But to take it serious I think that everyone has to experience the loss.

this is a disease of a trader, giving up too quickly and not surviving when a coin falls. Even though the market changes rapidly, when the stop loss should buy back and enjoy a little profit.

Its hard to deal with your investments when you already have emotional complications like stress and frustrations about the price because moat of the time, you will come up with a decision you regret after. Its good to have a limit where you stop losses but what if it increased big time after days?. If youre tired stop, pull yourself up and continue when your ok.

I can remember that I saw a thread of yours regarding trading on BitMEX. That exchange has some serious killer wicks it throws left and right from time to time. If you don't have a stop, you'll get liquidated in an instant.

Noobs not knowing what happened think their account has been emptied by hackers or in some cases they even accuse BitMEX of having stolen the funds. This just shows how much people are actually gambling.

People think to make a fortune using 10-100x leverage but end up with with empty pockets. I think it's safe to say that leverage trading in general has been glorified too much on social media.

You are quite right. On Bitmex, people are told to trade without a stop loss precisely because of the killer wicks this exchange has. To my mind, these wicks are clear sign of manipulation, but that's another story. So you have to have a stop if you want to avoid liquidation. You can be lucky and avoid liquidation 10 times in a row, but the 11th time may clear your account. Or, at least, you have to be very disciplined not to put at risk your whole account in a single trade.

To be fair, I have to mention that the stop loss on Bitmex is far from being perfect. Sometimes my stop loss gets triggered 50 or 100 USD after the actual value I had put in, but I guess one has to live with that.

Bitmex can be used in various ways. You can use it like a casino if you like, but that usually leads to disaster. If by any chance a person is lucky and manages to earn a lot of money, they should take that money and never come back again. Or I think disaster is imminent.

Yes, I agree. It's a dream of getting rich quickly. I have heard many sad stories, people loosing fortunes, and such, stories that you usually associate with gambling and casinos.

But, you don't have to go down that road. For example, leverage plays no role for me personally. I use Bitmex like it offered no leverage at all.

If you don't use leverage in a crazy way, it can offer some great advantages. For example, it has huge liquidity and nearly perfect user interface (for me at least). So I use it like any other exchange with advanced capabilities.

For example, on Bitmex you can go long or short, as you please. On the glorified Binance, for example, you can go long, but you cannot short! On Bitmex, you can have a "stop loss" and as many "take profit" levels as you like at the same time. On Binance you have to choose, you can either have a "stop loss" or "take profit" level. You cannot have them both at the same time.

I agree with most people here that you need to use stops but keep in mind you need to pick a good idea to put your stop loss at so it doesn't get hit and reverse on you.

I remember when I first started using stops, I found them useless because almost everytime my stop got hit and it reversed in exactly that area.

Then I found that you should never place stops at daily highs or lows or near psychological numbers like $7000 or $8000.

I know still we believe that stop loss should use for prevent loss and obviously it's true. But for me whenever I used stop loss most of time hit stop loss and pump the coin. Means I didn't losed but I were not able to get good profit. It's my bad luck on the trading. That's why right now I am not using stop loss (for basic trading) without obvious case.

Stop loss doesn't need to be viewed that way, its a trading strategy that has been used for people admitting that their trading plan was wrong and that stopping their losses is their only way to minimize their loss. Just think of it this way if you haven't triggered that stop loss where will you be at now? I'm sure if it goes down you'll be happy but if it goes up I know that you'll be sad, but the thing is you have stick to your trading plan and that is the best thing a trader could do. Most of the losses has been created by traders not sticking to their plan.

I've never uses stop loss, I could but I did not I don't know why. And I think it would not make any difference for me, I would still make loss but probably spend less time looking at the screen.

It depends on where and how I trade. If I trade spot without leverage, I am not using a stop loss. On Bitmex where I trade with leverage I do use the stop loss feature because there is way more risk attached to my trades now. Spot trades don't lead to liquidations, while leveraged trades on Bitmex do.

Bitmex is a bit shaky from time to time with mass liquidations happening out of nowhere, that's why I am a bit more flexible on where I place my stop. I'm usually going for 20% in either direction depending on the trade. 1-5% is what I consider too tight and will easily lead to a trigger. Despite Bitmex's thick orderbook it's still a thing to take into consideration.

You can minimize your losses through stop loss, if you are gone from trading for long time and the price keep falling, you can use this to prevent losing more. Except you are a daily trader who always seeing the chart, it doesn't need to use stop loss.

I can relate to you on this. Stop loss is a double edged sword for me, it might prevent you to loss more money but at the same time it also take away your opportunity to profit in a trade so before making that stop lose, decide patiently on what percentage to set-up, not too close to buying price.

My first stop loss took my entire account out. that's because I set no stop loss and saw an over 60% move south. Ever since then, I have learnt the hard way to always place a stop-loss, no matter how sure I am about the trade. It took a long time for me to realize the fact that to be a professional trader, you must learn to make the stop-loss your friend. why? because it's what will literally save your account. Learn to be sincere here, no one can say for sure what will happen to the markets. we can only make intelligent analyses and stick to the winning side. but for us to allow our greed to overtake us and not set a stop-loss will always keep our account in jeopardy. that is not the quality of a professional trader. My first stop loss, as i said, was horrible. Because of that, ever since then, I seldom set up a trade without my stop-loss. And, I'll be sincere, that style helped my account a lot.

For about 4 years, I have never done a stop loss. I prefer to stick to that price until I wait for it to rise again. Because I am optimistic that the investment in crypto is for the long term, and of course the market will not always be down, it will definitely rise again. Believe it.

I experienced this often times. When I set my stop loss and it accidentally hit it, my price prediction is happening. I find it so amusing that the market is so playful. But I am so grateful that there is stop loss. It helped me a lot in my trading. The way of the market is most of the times unpredictable. So, the stop loss is a good way  not to lose all your money or not being liquidated.

There is always a purpose of a stop loss. Especially when you are a margin trader.  It is designed directly to save up our fund and is designed to limit our order. It is a powerful tool for a trader to use it.

Mine was when I was using one of those trading bots. It had an option for stop loss and it was at default %90 for people who didn't want to sell at profit loss. I was using that because I didn't want stop loss, I am one of those long term people who are willing to hold a coin as long as possible and not sell them until there is a reason to sell it.

Of course, the bot didn't realize that and during that 2018 bear run one of the coins I was trading was done more than 90% and it sold, of course I took it back and buy it even more this time around but that was the first time I have ever sold for a loss, it wasn't for that long since I rebought but I said I would never do that again and haven't used the bot ever since that day.

Yeah stop loss is a very important tools to help you prevent more losses, and most of the beginners didn't know how bad the market could change and usually regret it after they witnessed their money go away, I learn to used stop loss in a hard way, I lost almost all of my portfolio in 2018 because I didn't pay attention to the market and didn't put any stop loss

Getting married to a position can be one of the worst decisions you can make as a trader, and this can easily happen if you don't set stops. It's always best to cut out a losing trade early and find a better entry later to ride out into profit, even though you might be emotionally attached to a losing trade. I also use stops pretty frequently, though I still infrequently do get stopped out on a trade because of a stop hunt or something of the sort. Always best to take a small loss over a liquidated position or a large loss.

I was already aware of that and I knew that when you are using stop loss you should be aware that when the stop loss happens that price might skyrocket at anytime. Before I started making use of stop loss in my trades I first read about what stop loss is all about and how it works and that's how I knew that there are different types of stop losses and you should always know which one to make use of. If you're using stop loss make sure that you set it up like for example to stop loss at 30% or something like that,, so that the price wouldn't drop below that and stop loss and the skyrocket.

I do use stop loss too for my trades now and I didn’t learn to appreciate this tool until I learn the hard after losing my trading money completely to greed and when the market started working against me, I had several opportunities to stop my loss manually but you know the thing with human mind, I kept hoping and believing that the market will pick back till I lost my trade completely to leveraging, and since then, I don’t trade manually again, Once I place my order at a convincing value, I set my take profit automatically and set my stop loss automatically, then close my trading platform with the hope that there will be a good news when next I visit the platform.

It would have been better that you just keep your coin in the wallet and continue holding it until it grows, because if you are doing this in trading, then you will be practicing long term investment and not trading. A trader takes advantage of every rise and fall within a short period of time which is usually with a day or week to make profit.

More so, someone who is margin trading or leveraging can never do that because if the coin being traded suffers loss of value more than the money he can trade, he will automatically lose the trade which stop loss would have just guard against if he had used it.