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Re: Recording the distance to the nearest level when you enter
Posted: Sat Oct 31, 2026 10:11 pm
by Fairman
Distance to a level behind the trade matters for stop placement too. If a long entry has support ten pips below, and the stop is placed just under it, the stop is protected by the level. If the nearest support is forty pips below and the stop is fifteen pips away, the stop sits in empty space with nothing defending it. Recording both distances, ahead and behind, gives a fuller picture. Trades with protected stops might have a noticeably different stop out rate from trades with stops in the open.
Re: Recording the distance to the nearest level when you enter
Posted: Tue Nov 03, 2026 6:38 am
by Fairman
Is it more useful to measure distance in pips or as a multiple of the stop? I'd say a multiple of the stop, or of ATR. Ten pips to the next level means very different things for a trade with a five pip stop and one with a thirty pip stop. Expressing the distance in units of risk, like two R of room to the next level, makes the numbers comparable across trades and pairs. It also links directly to whether the target is realistic, since a target of three R with only one R of room is asking a lot.
Re: Recording the distance to the nearest level when you enter
Posted: Thu Nov 05, 2026 10:05 am
by Fairman
The "what counts as a level" problem is real, and I went through it. For a while I marked anything that looked like a turning point, and unsurprisingly every trade seemed to have a level close by. Now my list is fixed: previous day high and low, the weekly open, and the round numbers ending in 00 and 50. Nothing else gets counted.
With that list I log the distance in pips from my entry to the nearest one in the direction of the trade. Example, buying EURUSD at 1.0832 with the previous day high at 1.0846 means 14 pips of room. My target was 20 pips and my stop 8, so the trade needed to push through a level to pay. When I looked at about 150 trades, the ones with less than 0.8R of space to the next level made nearly nothing, while those with 2R or more of space were my best group.
That changed how I take trades. If the level is closer than my minimum target, I either shrink the target to just before it, or skip it.
Do you measure to the level itself or to a few pips before it, where price tends to stall? And does a round number count as strongly as a previous high for you?