There are many ways that trading can frustrate you, but one of the most frustrating situations is when you get stopped out of a trade only to see it continue in your direction. It could have been a very profitable trade but you were stuck with a loss. Here’s a trade I took in CRM that shows this exact situation. I was stopped out by a few pennies only to see the stock continue down:

A lot of traders will take a stock completely off of their radar after they’ve had a loss in it – that’s understandable. What’s the only thing that’s more frustrating than taking a loss in a trade? Taking two losses in the same stock.

That said, it could make sense to keep those stocks on your radar to trade again. The problem is determining whether it makes sense to take the trade if a setup occurs after you’ve been stopped out already. When you re-enter trades, you’ll undoubtedly be stopped out a second time periodically. This can be psychologically difficult to endure and this situation often weighs more heavily in your mind (“Why didn’t I learn my lesson the first time I was stopped out?”).

The StockTickr Trading Journal provides a great way to keep track of this using tags (a.k.a. categories). Tagging your trades in your trading log lets you track and analyze subsets of your trades. When I started re-entering trades that I was stopped out of, I would assign those trades the tag “ReEnter”. This allowed me to compare how these “ReEnter” trades were performing compared to my trading system overall.

After accumulating several of these trades over time, it turns out that these ReEnter trades were outperforming the system overall – in fact, they were significantly better than average. These results were telling me that for this particular system that I trade, re-entering trades made a lot of sense – even if it’s psychologically difficult. Having this type of data available to analyze certainly makes it easier to take trades where your fear is telling you not to.

Will you re-enter trades in your system? I’m interested in hearing what others have to say about this practice.

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