The slippery slope of moving a stop loss on $DAX

Thought I'd share a particularly painful lesson from a few years back, trading the $DAX CFD. It was during a period of choppy consolidation, and I had a decent short position on from near a resistance level, stop just above it. Price started to retest that resistance, but not quite breaking it, just wiggling around my stop. Instead of letting the market decide, I convinced myself it was 'just noise' and moved my stop up by a few points, just enough to avoid the spike. It got hit, of course. Not only that, but after hitting my moved stop, price reversed sharply and would have been a significant winner if I had just left my original stop in place or, better yet, honoured the first one when it was almost triggered. The initial rationale was to 'give it more room' but it was really just hope. The mistake wasn't just losing money on that trade, but the erosion of discipline. Once you move one stop, the next one is easier to move, and then the next. It took a while to rebuild that trust in my own system and stick to the original plan, come what may.