Is Your Stop-Loss Actually Too Tight?
Stop guessing your stop distance. See exactly how often it would have been hit, using real price history instead of a hunch.
How Most Traders Actually Pick a Stop-Loss
Ask most traders how they chose their stop-loss and you'll usually get one of two answers: "it felt tight enough" or "I always use X%." Neither has anything to do with the coin they're actually trading.
A 3% stop might be perfectly reasonable for Bitcoin's typical daily range, but wildly too tight for a small-cap altcoin that swings 10%+ in a normal day — and the reverse is just as true.
The Invisible Cost of a Stop That's Too Tight
When your stop sits closer than the coin's ordinary day-to-day noise, it gets triggered by that noise, not by an actual trend reversal.
You get stopped out again and again even when your original read on the trade was right, and the losses pile up quietly. It's easy to blame "bad entries" or "bad luck," when the real issue is a stop distance that was never realistic to begin with.
Test It Against Real Data Instead of Guessing
The fix is straightforward: look at the coin's actual price history and count how many days it moved far enough to have hit your planned stop-loss (or target).
This is exactly what SizerTrade's built-in Backtest panel does. Once you run a position calculation, the panel appears right below it — pick a day, month, or year, and it pulls real historical price data for that coin and shows you how many days your stop (or target) price would actually have been touched, plus the estimated loss or profit each time. No spreadsheets, no manual charting.
A Real Example: 3% vs. 6% Over the Past Year
Say you're planning a 3% stop-loss below entry on an altcoin. Running the backtest over the past year shows that line would have been touched on roughly 40% of days.
Widen the stop to 6% and re-run it — the touch rate drops to about 12%. That 3% line wasn't catching reversals; it was catching the coin's normal daily wobble.
Widening the stop isn't the end of the story, though. To keep the same dollar risk, a wider stop means recalculating a lower leverage and a smaller position size. Plug that new 6% stop back into SizerTrade's calculator and it instantly gives you the adjusted leverage and position size for the same risk amount.
A 3% stop was touched on ~40% of days over the past year (about 146 days). A 6% stop was touched on ~12% of days (about 44 days). The wider stop needs a recalculated, lower leverage to keep the same dollar risk.
Backtest Your Own Stop-Loss — Free
Go to the Calculator →The Common Mistake: Testing Only One Calm Week
It's tempting to run the backtest over just the last week, see a low touch rate, and assume it'll hold forever.
A coin that's been quiet for a week isn't necessarily quiet in general. Check a mix of periods — day, month, and year — to see both recent behavior and how the same stop distance would have held up during the coin's more volatile stretches.
Not a Prediction — Evidence
Backtesting your stop-loss doesn't tell you the future. It replaces a guessed number with one grounded in how that specific coin has actually moved.
SizerTrade puts the whole workflow in one place — size your position with the calculator, then backtest the stop right below it.