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Forex Price-Action Strategies

It is Better to be Safe than Sorry.

Using Stop Loss is an essential component of trade management. The Forex market gets volatile from time to time. Taking an entry without using Stop Loss may make an account empty. Thus, under no circumstances, we shall take any entry without using Stop Loss. We need to make sure that we set our Stop Loss accordingly, which is neither too tight nor too saggy. In today’s lesson, we are going to demonstrate an example of that.

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The above chart is a daily chart. We see that the price finds its support and produces a bullish engulfing candle. The candle closes within the last swing high. The daily-H4 combination traders are to flip over to the H4 chart to take a long entry upon consolidation and bullish breakout. Let us have a look at the H4 chart.

The H4 chart looks extremely bullish. The chart produces a morning star right at the support zone and heads towards the North for one more candle. Traders are to keep an eye on the chart for the price consolidation.

The chart produces one more bullish candle. It then consolidates and creates a bullish engulfing candle breaching the last highest high on the chart. This is an ideal price action opportunity to trigger a long entry right after the last candle closes. Traders shall set the stop loss below the level of support, where the engulfing candle bounces.

The next candle comes out as a bearish candle approaching the Stop Loss level. However, if we set the Stop Loss below the support level, we would be safe here. Things do not look as good as we expected. Let us proceed to the next chart.

The next candle comes out as a bullish engulfing candle. Things look much better now. However, we must not miss the fact that the bullish engulfing candle has a bounce right at the Stop Loss level. If we set too tight Stop Loss, we would have to encounter a losing trade here. Instead of making the profit, we would lose money.

It is a debatable issue how far we shall set our Stop Loss. It is not recommended that we should set our Stop Loss too far. However, we shall set our Stop Loss below the level of support/resistance and add some extra pips. For intraday trading on the 5M, 15M, 30M, H1, and H4 chart, to measure the number of extra pips, we may use the spread of that particular pair. Let us assume we are taking a long entry on EURUSD. If the spread is three pips, we may add three extra pips to set our Stop Loss. We must do a lot of back-testing with our favorite pairs to find out the perfect measure for this to be safe with our entries. As they say, “it is better to be safe than sorry.”

 

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By Tareq Sikder

Tareq Sikder has been engaged with Forex trading as well as Forex writing since 2010. He mainly is a Technical Analyst and a Price Action Trader. He is an author of E-book, a Live Webinar Speaker. Expertise: Candlestick, Channel Trading, Fibonacci Trading.

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