Trailing Stops

What are trailing stops?

Trailing stops are a risk management tool that allow you to manage your risk without restricting your potential profit.

Trailing stops help you to secure your gains as the market moves in your favour, giving you added flexibility as they will automatically track your profitable positions so that you don’t have to continuously monitor your position and move your stop manually.

It has always been possible to move your stop order manually if the market has moved in your favour, but now you can set our system to do this automatically for you.

How do they work?

A trailing stop can be added when placing a trade by ticking the “Trailing” box on the trade ticket. You can also amend an existing stop order to be set to trailing from Order Book by clicking on the AMEND button.

Once you have ticked the “Trailing” box you need to set the distance you want your trailing stop away. If the market then moves in your favour, the trailing stop will move in that direction at a set size of increments. For details of the minimum distances and set size of increments applicable to trailing stops please see the Market Information Sheets.

Please note that trailing stops are not guaranteed so you may still be subject to slippage in volatile market conditions, so it is not possible to have both a trailing stop and a guaranteed stop.

There are no extra charges for selecting your stop order to be trailing.

Trailing stops are not available on all markets so you should check the Market Information sheets to see if the trailing stop facility is available.

Example of a trailing stop

Here is an example of how one might use a trailing stop.

Buy £10 per point of GBP/USD Rolling Daily at 1.6050. The level of the stop order is set at 1.6030 and the "Trailing" box is ticked.

If the market moves in your favour (higher) then the trailing stop will move in that direction according to the set size of increments applicable to that market. If it is set to increments of 10 points (you can find this out from the Market Information Sheets), then if your GBP/USD Rolling Daily position moves higher by 10 points (to 1.6060), your trailing stop will jump up 10 points to 1.6040.

If GBP/USD Rolling Daily continues to rally without retracing, then for every 10 points it rises, your trailing stop will carry on stepping higher in increments of 10 points.

If at some point GBP/USD Rolling Daily does turn lower, then your trailing stop will remain in place at the last level it has stepped to, acting as a normal stop order.