A stop is the price at which your idea is disproven. If you bought a breakout over a level, the idea dies when price closes back under it — not when the loss reaches an amount that annoys you. A stop set by chart structure works; a stop set by personal comfort gets hit right before the reversal.

That fixes an order of operations that never changes: find the level, decide where the idea dies, and only then compute how many shares to buy. Starting from "I'll put in ten thousand and see" reverses it, and the position size ends up arbitrary.

Even a method that is right 55% of the time will produce a run of six to eight losses — that's plain statistics, not bad luck. The only question that matters: if it happens tomorrow, how much of the account is left? If the answer is "almost none", the size is wrong, not the method.

The math of a drawdown is brutal: a 50% loss needs a 100% gain just to get back to flat. A 20% loss needs 25%. Keeping losses small isn't conservatism — it's the mathematical condition for recovering at all.

Risk per trade: a quarter of a percent to one percent of the account. Total open risk: usually up to three or four percent across every open position combined. Maximum daily or weekly loss: a number set in advance, and when it's hit you stop trading — not "one more trade to win it back".