Risk & money management
Where should I place my stop loss?
At the price where your trade idea is objectively wrong — not at a fixed percent chosen for comfort. For trend entries that's typically beyond the recent swing low/high; for volatility-aware placement, a multiple of ATR (commonly 1.5–3×) adapts the distance to how much the market normally wiggles, so normal noise doesn't stop you out of a good position.
Stops interact with position size: a wider stop isn't riskier if you shrink the position to keep risk-per-trade constant. The combination worth testing (and what a backtest settles empirically per strategy) is stop distance × position size × whether a trailing mechanism improves or hurts that specific system.
The fastest answer is a test
Most 'does X work?' questions take a minute to answer empirically — on real data, with an out-of-sample check, free.
Backtest a strategy freeMore in this topic
Educational content, not financial advice. Backtested and historical figures describe past periods only; past performance does not guarantee future results.