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Showing the ask line, and why your short got stopped above the chart high

Almost every FX chart in MT4, MT5 and by default on many TradingView feeds is drawn from bid prices. That's fine for reading price, but it hides half of what's happening to your orders.

When you buy, you enter at the ask. When you sell, you enter at the bid. When you close a buy, you exit at the bid. When you close a sell, you exit at the ask. So a short position's stop loss triggers when the ask reaches your stop, not when the bid does.

That's why a short can get stopped out above the high you see on the chart. The bid never got there, but the ask did, because the spread widened for a moment or was simply wider than you allowed for.

Showing the ask line fixes most of the confusion. In MT5 it's in the chart properties, under the Show tab, a box called Show Ask line. In MT4 it's in the same place under Common. On TradingView you can turn on bid and ask lines in the chart settings for symbols where the feed provides them.

With the ask line visible, you see the spread at every moment. Around news or the rollover, you can watch it widen. Placing a short stop then becomes a matter of putting it beyond the high plus a realistic spread, not just beyond the high.

It's a small setting. It explains a lot of stop outs that otherwise look unfair.

The ask line only shows the current ask, not the history. Your chart still shows bid highs and lows from the past, so you can't see after the fact where the ask went during a spike. Some platforms and indicators can plot a separate ask chart or a spread histogram under the price. That's helpful for checking past stop outs. Recording your own spread history with a small script is another way, and it makes reviewing a disputed stop much faster because you have the numbers rather than a guess. Keep it simple.

Buy stops and sell limits trigger on the ask too, and that catches breakout traders. If you place a buy stop just above a range high, the ask reaches it before the bid does. With a wide spread, your buy stop can fill while the bid chart still shows price inside the range. That's not necessarily a bad fill, but it means your breakout entry isn't triggered by price breaking out, it's triggered by the spread. A buffer above the high that includes the normal spread makes the trigger more meaningful. It removes the guesswork.

Gold and the minor crosses show this much more than EURUSD, because their spreads are wider and more variable. A gold short with a stop a dollar above the high can get hit just from spread on a fast moment. When moving between instruments, it's useful to check the typical spread on each one and adjust the stop buffer to match. A fixed buffer that works on EURUSD is usually too small on gold and too large on a tight major in the London session. The ask line makes it obvious which instruments need the bigger buffer once you watch them side by side for a session or two.

Turning on the ask line also makes you aware of spread habits you might not have noticed. Many traders discover their broker's spread at the London open is wider than they assumed, or that it jumps every day at a specific minute. That kind of thing is invisible on a bid only chart. Leaving the ask line on for a week and watching it at the times you trade is a cheap way to learn how your broker's pricing behaves on your pairs. A note of the times when the spread jumps can go straight into your session plan as hours to avoid.

A simple way to build that spread history is a script that writes the time, bid and ask once a second to a file, kept running only during the hours you trade plus the rollover. A day of that is a few megabytes. When a stop gets taken above the visible high, you can open the file at that minute and see the ask peak directly. The rollover window is where it pays off most: the spread on some crosses goes several times wider for a minute or two, and a short placed a little above the high gets clipped without the bid ever getting close.