Trading knowledge libraryWhat Is a Trailing StopMarket Basics
Market Basics
What Is a Trailing Stop
A trailing stop is a stop loss that moves up behind a rising price and never moves back down. This paper shows you how it moves, where a twenty-pip trail stood hour by hour on one real day as the price climbed, why on MetaTrader it only follows while your terminal is open, and how to switch one on.
A trailing stop is a stop loss that moves. A stop loss is the order that closes a trade for you at a price below your entry if the market falls to it. A trailing one follows the price as it rises, always the same distance below the highest point the price has reached, and it never moves back down. A pip is the fourth decimal place of the price. A twenty-pip trailing stop on a buy at 1.15872 waits until the price is twenty pips up, at 1.16072; from then on it sits twenty pips under the highest price so far, stepping up with each new high and standing still through each dip. The first dip deeper than twenty pips reaches it and closes the trade.
Where it stood, hour by hour
Here is the real day with the stop drawn where it stood. You bought at the open of 3 September 2026, typed a stop loss at 1.15672, and switched on a twenty-pip trail. For nine hours the price was never twenty pips up and the stop stayed where you typed it. At 09:00 the price reached 1.16083 and the trail began: the stop moved to 1.15883, twenty pips under that high. From there it stepped — 1.15947 at 10:00, 1.16101 at 15:00, 1.16211 at 19:00 — and between the steps it stood still while the price dipped and came back.
