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Grouping your trades by stop distance in the journal

Nearly every journal has a column for the stop, but few people ever sort their results by how wide it was. I think it's one of the more revealing cuts you can make.

Add a column with the stop distance in pips for each trade. Then, after a couple of months, group the trades into a few buckets. For a scalper on the majors, something like under 5 pips, 5 to 10, 10 to 15, and over 15 is a decent start. Gold and yen crosses need their own buckets.

Then compare the groups. Win rate, average R, and how often the trade was stopped out and then went on to hit where the target would have been.

What you often find is that one bucket behaves very differently. Very tight stops might have a much lower win rate than expected, because they sit inside normal noise. Very wide stops might have a good win rate but poor R, because the targets didn't grow with them.

This tells you something useful about your stop placement rule. If the tight stop trades are consistently weaker, you might be placing stops by habit, too close to entry, rather than by structure.

It also helps with costs. On tight stops, spread is a bigger share of the risk, and the journal shows how much that's costing you in practice.

Stop distance in pips can be misleading across different volatility conditions. A 6 pip stop on a quiet Asian session is relatively wide, while the same stop at the London open is tight. If you want a fairer comparison, record the stop as a multiple of the current ATR as well. Then group by that instead. It shows whether your stops are tight or wide relative to the market at that moment, which is often more meaningful than the raw pip number, especially when comparing pairs. Most platforms show ATR on a chart, so recording it at entry takes a second.

Check whether stop distance changes with your mood or recent results. Some traders tighten stops after a losing streak to reduce money lost per trade, which can actually increase the number of losses. Others widen them after wins because they feel confident. Plotting stop distance over time in the journal shows these drifts. A steady stop distance policy is usually healthier than one that changes with how the last few trades went, and the journal makes the drift easy to see. A small chart of stop size per week usually makes the drift obvious.

Combine stop distance with the setup tag. Some setups might work well with tight stops and others need more room. A breakout setup might suit a tight stop just beyond the break level, while a pullback setup might need room below a swing. If both use the same stop habit, one of them is probably suffering. Grouping by setup and stop bucket together shows which combinations work, and it can lead to setup specific stop rules instead of one size for everything. It's one of the more useful pivot tables you can build from a journal.

Look at the trades that were stopped out by a small margin, say within a pip or two past the stop, and then moved strongly in your direction. If there are a lot of them in one bucket, it suggests the stop for that bucket sits right where sweeps tend to reach. Adding a small extra buffer for that group might convert some of those losses into winners. Test the change on past trades in the journal before applying it live. Even a one pip buffer can change the picture for that bucket.

Sorting by stop distance is revealing. Doing the same split by session makes it even sharper. A 5 pip stop on EURUSD in the London morning and a 5 pip stop in the late New York session are not the same trade, because the normal movement at those times is very different. If the tight stop bucket looks bad, check whether the losses come from the busy hours. It may be that the tight stops work fine in quiet conditions and fail when volatility is high, which points to a rule about timing rather than stop size.