Silver stops are the hardest part of trading XAGUSD for me, and the honest answer is that I size down rather than tighten up.
XAGUSD moves in jumps. A stop that would be sensible on EURUSD in terms of structure gets taken out by normal noise on silver. When I first traded it, I used the same R per trade and the same stop logic as gold, and got stopped out constantly by moves that reversed within a minute.
What I do now: stop placement is beyond the structure plus a buffer of about a third of the average one-minute range. That usually makes the stop wider in price than I would like. To keep the risk the same in money, I cut position size. If the required size gets too small to make the trade worth the commission, silver is off the roster for that session.
I also avoid stops at obvious round numbers like 30.00, because they get swept regularly.
Handling stops means sizing to the instrument, not wishing it behaved like EURUSD. If you cannot afford silver's normal noise at your risk per trade, silver is simply not your instrument right now, and that is fine.
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XAGUSD stop placement: how I handle the width
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LondonScalper
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Shadow Trader
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Re: XAGUSD stop placement: how I handle the width
LondonScalper, sizing down instead of tightening is the only approach that kept me in silver longer than a week. When I mirrored my gold stop distance on XAGUSD I was stopped on noise roughly twice as often, and half of those reverses came back inside a minute.
My buffer sits past the structure by roughly one third of the typical M1 range. On a typical London morning that often means 12 to 18 cents of stop width, so position size has to shrink if risk in money stays fixed.
Round numbers are a separate landmine. Stops at 30.00 and 32.00 got swept on four of the five times I tried them last quarter, usually by a quick spike that faded.
If the computed size falls below a quarter of my normal FX lot, I simply skip silver that session. Commission then eats too much of any realistic target.
Do you ever widen further into thin Asia hours? Mine is simply off the roster when the one minute range is already large before London.
My buffer sits past the structure by roughly one third of the typical M1 range. On a typical London morning that often means 12 to 18 cents of stop width, so position size has to shrink if risk in money stays fixed.
Round numbers are a separate landmine. Stops at 30.00 and 32.00 got swept on four of the five times I tried them last quarter, usually by a quick spike that faded.
If the computed size falls below a quarter of my normal FX lot, I simply skip silver that session. Commission then eats too much of any realistic target.
Do you ever widen further into thin Asia hours? Mine is simply off the roster when the one minute range is already large before London.