The market turns right after your stop loss is hit

You have said this, or you have heard someone say it. The stop was hit, and then the price went the way you had expected. It feels personal, because from where you were sitting it looks personal. Nothing on this page will tell you it did not happen. What this page can do is set out plainly what each of your order types does when the trigger is touched, because once you have seen that, the part of the sequence you have a say in becomes easier to see.

What a stop order actually does when the trigger is touched

A stop-loss order is not an exit. It is an instruction that turns into an exit order when a price you nominate is touched. With a plain SL you give a trigger and a limit price. With an SL-M, where your broker offers it, you give the trigger and the exit goes in as a market order. Some brokers do not offer SL-M on options at all, so check what your own order window actually gives you, and read your broker's own page on order types rather than anyone's summary of it.

In both cases the order is waiting on a trigger. Nobody can see it in the market depth, and nothing of yours can be matched at that price until the trigger is touched. What happens then depends on which one you used. With an SL-M the fill can come back at a price worse than your trigger, because it takes whatever is on the other side. With a plain SL the fill can never be worse than the limit you gave, but it can fail to happen at all, and then you are still in the position with the price moving away from you.

You cannot see anyone else's orders, and nobody can see yours. What your own order history does show is the trigger you nominated and the price you were filled at. Those are two numbers in your own records, and the gap between them, where there is one, is a number rather than a story. In your own trades this one reads like this.

• The trigger you nominated and the price you were filled at are not the same number.
• You moved the stop once you were already in.
• The SL went in minutes after the entry rather than with it.
• You took the same side again in the same session after being stopped.
• You can say where the stop was. You cannot say why it was there rather than somewhere else.
• You told someone afterwards that it had been hunted.

Counting it from your own order history

Three tallies. Two of them come out of your trade book; the third needs the order detail from the same day, because changes to an order usually do not survive the close. First, of your last twenty exits, how many were the stop order triggering and how many were you closing by hand? Second, of the trades that exited on a stop, how many had that stop moved at least once after you were already in? Write that fraction over the trades that had a stop at all, not over twenty. Third, the one that is easiest to skip: how many times did you take the same side again in the same session after being stopped, and how did those second trades end? Keep the two sets separate. You are not proving anything about the market with these numbers. You are finding out what you do, which is the only part of the sequence that is yours.