Some trades we take are in wrong direction but because we want to be hopeful that it will come back to profit, we allow it and it close against us. If we keep doing this, it is the exact opposite attitude of someone that wants to keep their initial capital.
There are steps you can take to reduce the loss before you lose every thing or it get to your stop loss and such is
1. Stop the trade: This is very good but difficult for many traders to do it but if you do that, you have potential loss that you have saved.
2. Use of stoploss all the time: This help your losses to be minimal.
3. Try to adjust your stoploss: You can do this if your trade is already in profit and you suspect that it is going back to your entry price, so you can take your stoploss to entry and all the order to run for profit or it stops at your entry.
That's the story for most of the traders I guess. No matter how good of a trader we are, we always hope to maximize our profits.
This is where many of us fail and wait a little longer in the hope to rake back profits but end up losing them.
This is why a dedicated strategy is a must and more than that, a strong will to follow the strategy is definitely needed.
As you said, we should always put the stop loss since it helps us many times to stop losing more.
Stopping the trade is something we should do when we have no idea what to do or what strategy we should use at that particular time.
Times like these do arrive but frequently stopping the trade might also make us lose the opportunities to gain from the market.
