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Strategies & Market Trends : Your Worst Trading Enemy.. You -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: davidrmm who wrote (44)	1/16/2001 5:59:31 PM
From: shawnwolff	Respond to of 223

To: davidrmm I like the way you are going about your education, cautiously and systematically, with money you can afford to lose. You are right I think about traders holding through losses, and holding profits too long. People tend to get greedy, and when they have a gain, they want to think it will keep going, and they will have caught "the big one". Its also about fear. Fear of taking a loss. Fear of being wrong. Hope that it will come back and everything will be ok. Hoping to make past losses back. And even when it does come back, its amazing how greed returns, and they will keep holding, hoping that this horrible pain will turn into a gain afterall. Its amazing how our minds taint common sense. To answer your question, yes, I set a stop with every entry. For every trade, whether it is long-term or short-term, I have set strategy, expectations, and criteria that need to be met. I then set a stop at entry, pre-determined, to define the risk right away. This keeps my plan clear, and it helps me to keep the stop. Its important to keep my trading organized. As the stock moves in my direction, I keep trailing stops up, trapping profits in, while still giving it a bit of room to work. But when that trailing stop hits, I take the profits and do not look back. The time to set a stop though is right when you enter. In my opinion, if you enter a trade with no clear expectations or plan, and you find yourself faced with a loss, and are deciding what to do about it as it happens, you are leaving the trade open for emotions to take over and that is dangerous territory. - Shawn