Progressive Risk Reduction


  • The trades you take must have predetermined risk defined. Ideally never more than 2% of equity per trade. If you are new, one might consider 1% risk per trade as a maximum exposure.
  • The purpose of protective stops is to control risk.
  • After the trade has been executed and the position sees profits.. the stop should be managed in such a way as to reduce the risk as the position moves into profitability.
  • PSLO stands for protective stop loss order, all trades must utilize it. It is the only means of defense in adverse market
  • conditions. The initial PSLO must never be widened. If the trade stops out, the trade was unprofitable, that's it.. period.
  • When your trades stop out, it is a wonderful opportunity to grow in your understanding as a developing trader. Not all of the best lessons are learned from winning trades. You develop less fear from taking losses and you quickly overcome both fear & greed by routinely taking controlled losses and trading out of their drawdown.
  • You are never permitted to widen your initial protective stop loss order.
  • Without proper utilization of a stop loss, you are in this for the short term and will eventually be taken out of the game.
  • When utilizing stop loss management, you will be working within the middle and/or smallest time frame of the 3 time frames that you framed your trade around. Ideally within the middle time frame. For example, on swing trades you would be working within the 4 hour time frame.
  • There is nothing wrong with a 63 pip stop on a higher time frame trade/swing trade. That is also how someone with a day job can take a significant amount of pips out of the market.
  • For swing trades, your first profit objective is the low that you drew the Fibonacci on (going short).
  • There is also nothing wrong with taking some profits at predetermined support levels that price may bounce at before it gets to the swing low you drew the Fib on.
  • As the trade starts to move into profit, we can start moving our stop loss closer to our entry point.
  • As the trade moves in your favor on the short trade above, you are looking for previous swing lows to be broken. 
  • When you see those lows being broken, you will start narrowing your stop loss range trying to get to a break even status. 
  • You are not rushing to get to break even because you don't want to get stopped out prematurely and then see the trade eventually go in your favor.
  • Keep your stop loss 10 pips above the previous 2 swing highs in the example above.
  • For a position/swing trade, you would be using the intermediate term highs for stop loss placement and not just the short term highs.
  • You are not going to be growing very much as a trader by being a small trader and putting small risk on and only taking little small pieces out of the market.
  • You want to be assuming risk, but still protecting yourself at the same time.
  • With higher time frame level trades you can take smaller portions of profit to allow you to participate and longer term swings.
  • You can use lower time frames to find a more precise entry with a smaller stop, but we can use a larger stop because our profit objectives are so much larger.
  • Once the profit objective is met on your original OTE, that is when you start trailing the stop based on the past 2 swing points.
  • In the image below we have very nice market structure for going long because of all the higher lows surrounding the low inside the OTE.  
  • Don't abandon the concept of taking partial profits.
  • This stop loss management concept works with every asset class