Even trading highly accurate turn dates requires the use of stop-loss orders when trades are made. The great W. D. Gann, well known for making incredible market predictions and a large amount of money trading, admonishes his students to always use stop-loss orders.
The key to successfully making a business out of trading is to properly manage your money and your risk. Your money and risk go hand in hand.
For example, in managing your money you need to look at how much you have in your account and then plan on only risk a small percentage of it on any given trade. If the trade goes against you by this certain percentage, you must exit the trade.
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For most traders, they find it hard to exit a losing trade in hopes that it will recover and turn out a winner instead. More often than not, sadly, the loss gets worse and the account takes a bigger hit. Many times, this ends up wiping out the account and putting the trader out-of-business.
In order to implement a proper money and risk managing scenario, the trader needs to be disciplined to accept the small loss and get out. The problem that often arises is that decision making starts to get a bit foggy for many traders as they watch the prices moving up and down, and the decision to exit is often being second guessed or questioned during the trade.
To help in regards to this problem that most traders have, the risk must be assessed and the price to exit must be planned BEFORE the trade is initiated. Once the trade is active, a stop-loss order should be placed at the predetermined price level and not moved except when the plan calls for moving it towards and into profit, not the other direction.