Daily Loss Limits Save Careers

[Fairman]

Having it flatten automatically is the cleanest way, takes the 'one more trade' argument out of your hands. Just be careful running it on anything that holds overnight, the daily reset can do weird things around rollover.

[LondonNewsTrader]

It tracks your account equity at the start of each day, monitors your live drawdown, and immediately halts all trading and flattens open positions if your hard cap is breached.

One caveat for anyone using the Pine version live: a TradingView strategy only knows its own simulated equity. strategy.equity is the backtest account, not your broker balance, so the script can halt and flatten its own simulated trades but it can't see positions you opened manually or through another tool. To protect a real account, the limit has to live where the orders live, in an EA, a cBot or the broker's own risk settings, with the Pine script sending alerts at most.

The principle in your first paragraph is right though. One wrinkle from experience: most of my worst days started on a data release, with a loss in the first minute and then two more trying to win it back. A daily limit stops the damage at the end, while a rule against a second trade on the same release stops it at the beginning.

[PropScalpDesk]

Half the firm’s daily is where I land too. Matching their 5% with my own 5% means one slipped stop ends the seat.

Personal soft daily sits inside the firm hard daily on purpose. Room to spiral is not a feature.

[Shadow Trader]

One side: always use limits. Crossing the spread on every entry costs maybe 0.3 pips on a major, and on a 3-pip target that is a tenth of the whole trade.

The other side: use market orders. A limit order fills most easily when price is moving against it, and gets skipped when price runs straight in the intended direction. The trades that never fill are often the strong ones. What remains is a skewed sample.

Both sides have a point. Limits really do save the spread. Market orders really do capture momentum. The question is which cost is bigger for a particular setup.

An example. A trader places 50 limit entries and 38 fill. Of the 12 that didn't, 9 would have hit target. The filled 38 might look worse than the full set of 50 ever would, even though each saved a few tenths of a pip.

Counting missed trades is dull work, and almost nobody does it.

Moving a limit order half a pip closer to price changes the fill rate more than most people expect, which makes the missed-trade count even more telling.

Do you scalp with market or limit entries, and have you ever counted what the unfilled ones would've done?

[FXS Prop Desk]

Calculating on every tick is the right choice for a daily stop, since a loss limit that waits for the candle close can be overrun by quite a lot on a fast bar. One thing to verify with that setting in Pine is how it behaves in backtests. On historical data, the script only sees the bar's open, high, low and close, not the real tick sequence, so the backtest may show the stop triggering at a better price than it would have live. Testing it on a demo chart in real time for a week would show the realistic fill.