Entry

The three ways to enter

• Market entry. Buy or sell now at the current price. It always fills, but you take whatever price is there, including any slippage in a fast market.
• Limit entry. A pending order to buy below the current price or sell above it. It is how you enter on a retest or a pullback into a zone. Better price, but no fill if price turns early.
• Stop entry. A pending order to buy above the current price or sell below it, so you only get in if price breaks a level. It confirms the move but pays up for it, and a sweep can fill it and reverse.

Whichever you use, the stop loss comes from the chart first: where the idea is proven wrong. The entry is then chosen so that the distance to the stop and to the target makes sense.

What traders disagree on

• One price or a zone. Some plans give a single entry; others give a zone and leave the exact fill to you.
• Confirmation or anticipation. Confirmation traders wait for a close, a break or a lower-timeframe signal and accept a worse price. Anticipation traders place limits at the level and accept that some of them fill on trades that fail.
• Scaling in. Splitting one position across two or three entries gives an average price that depends on how many fill. If you scale in, size the whole position from the worst case: all orders filled and the stop hit.

StraviFX gives one entry level with each setup, so the stop distance, the ratio and the lot size are all measured from the same price.

A worked example

A 4-hour USD/JPY chart, a sell. The prices are an illustration, not real data. A JPY pip is 0.01.

• The plan: stop at 151.80, above the swing high; target at 150.20, the next low. Price is at 151.20 now; a zone the idea sells from sits at 151.50.
• Market entry at 151.20: 60 pips of risk, 100 pips of reward, 1:1.67.
• Limit entry at 151.50: 30 pips of risk, 130 pips of reward, 1:4.33.
• Sized at 1% of a $2,000 account ($20): a USD/JPY pip is worth about $6.60 per standard lot at these prices (100,000 × 0.01 ÷ price). The market entry allows 0.05 lots, risking about $20 to make about $33. The limit entry allows 0.10 lots, risking about $20 to make about $86.

Same idea, same stop, same target, same dollar risk. The limit entry pays well over twice as much if it fills, and nothing if price rises only to 151.40 before falling to the target without it. The pip calculator and the lot size calculator do this for any pair.

Why it matters

Beginners spend most of their time on direction: up or down. But a right call entered late can still lose money over time, because it risks a lot to make a little and needs a high win rate to break even. The entry is where direction turns into numbers, and the risk-to-reward ratio shows whether those numbers are worth it.

Common mistakes

• Chasing. Entering after a big candle because the move "is happening". The stop is now far away and the target close.
• Picking the entry first, then a stop that fits. Shrinking the stop to make a late entry look good puts it inside normal price noise. Move the entry, not the stop.
• Forgetting the spread. Buys fill at the ask, sells at the bid. On a tight plan, a 2-pip spread changes the ratio.
• Not resizing. A different entry means a different stop distance, which means a different lot size. Recalculate every time.

Questions

Entries in the app

Each StraviFX setup comes with one entry price, a stop loss and two targets, with the pips and the ratio for each, and the lot size for your account and risk. On Premium's extended analysis, when price at market is too far from the level that would prove the idea wrong to reach a target of at least 1.5 times the risk, the plan uses a pullback entry closer to that level instead of shrinking the stop. The app never places the trade; the decision stays with you.

Related terms

• Market structure: The sequence of swing highs and lows a market prints: rising is bullish, falling is bearish, neither is a range.
• Break of Structure (BOS): A candle close beyond the last swing high or low in the direction of the trend. It signals continuation.
• Change of Character (CHoCH): The first break against the trend: an uptrend closing below its last higher low, or a downtrend above its last lower high.
• Market Structure Shift (MSS): The confirmed flip that can follow a CHoCH: a failed swing in the old direction, then a close beyond the next swing.
• Swing high / swing low: A candle whose high is above its neighbours, or whose low is below them. The pivots every structure reading is measured from.
• Higher highs / higher lows: The four swing labels (HH, HL, LH, LL) and what each combination says: uptrend, downtrend or range.
• Range / consolidation: Price moving between a ceiling and a floor with no new highs or lows beyond them. A reason to wait, or to trade the edges.
• Retest: Price coming back to a level it has just closed beyond, to see whether the level now holds from the other side.
• Liquidity: Resting orders, mostly stop losses, that pool just beyond obvious highs, lows and round numbers. Price is often drawn toward them.
• Liquidity sweep / stop hunt: A push past an obvious high or low that triggers the stops there, then closes back inside. A close beyond is a breakout.
• Buy-side / sell-side liquidity: Buy orders resting above price (BSL) and sell orders resting below it (SSL). The pools a move is likely to travel toward.
• Equal highs / equal lows: Two or more highs or lows at nearly the same price. A flat edge that collects stops, so a common sweep target.
• Order block (OB): The last opposing candle before a strong move away. A zone price may return to, with the stop just beyond it.
• Fair Value Gap (FVG): A three-candle gap where candle 1's high and candle 3's low don't overlap. Traded through fast, so often revisited.
• Breaker block: A failed order block that price closes through, then returns to from the other side, where it can act the opposite way.
• Mitigation block: A failed order block after a swing that fell short. Price breaks it, then returns from the other side as trapped traders exit.
• Supply / demand zone: The base a sharp move left from: demand below price, supply above. The first return to a fresh zone usually counts most.
• Premium / discount: A range split at its 50% midpoint, equilibrium. Buy in the discount half, sell in the premium half.
• Optimal Trade Entry (OTE): The 62–79% pullback of the last impulse leg. A deep entry that keeps the stop close and the target far.
• Stop loss: An order that closes the trade at a set price to cap the loss. It goes where the idea is proven wrong, plus a buffer.

See every term in the trading glossary.