Hunting for stops

[jgerousis]

Some time passed without adding a new tip. So here you are.

The tip today will be on how to deal with stop losses and stop orders hunters. What I mean with hunters are brokers who hunt for your stop losses. I have received many emails from people who use to follow the up with my live trading orders and results, complaining that their brokers have triggered some orders on their platforms, but not on my platform. Although me and them had the same orders' numbers, yet the low or high of their broker differed or spiked by 2-3 pips more than me. In some cases it reached 10 pips.

Unfortunatly this is a very difficult situation to deal with. And it will surely cost you a lot of money. But here are the steps you should take to try to solve it:

1. First of all, if you feel that your broker is hunting for your stops, then you should open an account at another broker and start comparing your broker's lows and highs with this broker.

If you still feel that your broker is really hunting for your stops, email them and explain the situation and provide evidence (the other broker's lows and highs)

If your broker does denies this, or never tries to hear or solve this, then the only solution is to change your broker.

2. Another act you could do to make sure that your broker is honest, is to always add 2-3 pips to your orders. This method was found useful by some traders I advised to. For example, if you use hans123 and your order looks like this BUY GBP @192.10 SL 191.75 TP 193.30. Then make your order like this BUY GBP @ 192.13 SL 191.72 TP 193.33. This will surely save you from stop hunts, because it will be very wide for your broker to make such a spike, and the difference would be between his high and other brokers high would be wider and clearer. And this method would also save sometimes from false breakouts. However the drawback is that you pay more pips for this protection. However one the traders found a solution for this, by using one of my older tips, and when he closes the orders at 23:00 CET, he tries to save himslef 2-3 pips using my older tip,, and thus he is re-gaining what he paid before.

3. Putting mental stops. Which means, you actually place the stop loss in your mind. You do not put it on the platform. You say if GBP reached 191.75 I will stop it manually. This way, your broker would not know where the stop is, and would not try to hunt it.