Why did your signal hit the stop loss?
You took the signal exactly as posted. Price went the wrong way, hit the stop, and the trade closed at a loss. It is the most common question any signal service gets, and the honest answer is not comfortable: that is the system working, not failing.
206 of our 770 published trades — 26.8% — closed at a stop loss. We publish every one of them, because a service showing you only the other 48.6% is showing you a filtered sample.
A stop loss is the cost, not the fault
No entry method is right more than it is wrong by a wide margin, and any that claims to be is either very new or not counting properly. A strategy earns money by making its wins bigger than its losses, not by avoiding losses.
Our average stop costs -15.7 pips. Our average TP3 returns +46.6 pips — about three times as much. That ratio is the entire business model. Remove the losing trades and you remove the mechanism that makes the winners affordable.
Losing trades resolve fastest
One pattern in the data is worth knowing, because it changes how a losing trade feels. Our stop-outs close in a median 1.6 hours. Trades that reach TP2 take 4.5 hours.
Losers fail quickly. A setup that was wrong is usually wrong immediately — price rejects the level and moves. A trade still alive after a few hours is, on our record, more likely to be working than not. That is worth remembering at the point where waiting feels unbearable.
Three causes worth acting on
- You entered late. The most common and the most fixable. These are short-timeframe setups: entering well after the alert gives you a worse price against the same stop, which widens your real risk and narrows your real reward. If the move has already happened, skip the trade. There will be another.
- Your spread is wider than you think. A stop sitting a few pips beyond a level gets taken out by a spread widening at a session change or around news, on a trade that would otherwise have survived. Check what your broker charges on the pairs you actually trade.
- You moved the stop. Widening a stop to avoid a loss converts a planned, survivable loss into an unplanned one. It is the single fastest way to turn a positive-expectancy strategy into a negative account.
And one that is nobody's fault
Sometimes the setup was sound, the entry was clean, the spread was fine, and price went the other way. That is variance, and it is not a signal to change anything. Losing runs are a normal feature of any real record — ours included, and ours are published.
What actually helps
Manage the stop as the trade works rather than leaving it where it started. Once a trade reaches TP1, move the stop up to lock in profit rather than back to your entry price — a stop sitting at entry banks nothing when price returns, which it does on roughly half the trades that reach TP1. Before TP1, moving your stop up to whatever profit you are happy with is your call, and it is the safer choice for the account.
What does not help is skipping trades after a loss. The next signal has no memory of the last one, and a losing streak is the worst moment to start filtering — it is exactly when the set you are about to skip contains the recovery.
Every stop-out we have ever taken is public at teachtrades.com/results. Look at the losing runs before you subscribe to anything, ours or anyone else's.