Stopped Out

You bought a stock at $20 a share. For piece of mind, you put a stop-loss order at $18 a share, which represents an instruction to your broker to sell the shares automatically if they reach $18. You go to lunch one day with the stock hovering around $21 a share. While you're out, the city suffers a massive power outage and you get stuck in the subway for three hours, pressed against a hairy, sweaty guy with awful B.O. When you finally get out, you discover that the power outage sparked a brief plunge in the stock market. It quickly recovered, but it turns out your stock briefly dropped to $17.98, before rebounding back above $19. However, because it hit $18, even ever so briefly, it tripped the stop-loss order.

You've been stopped out. It's the term used when a stop-loss order gets executed. Often, the context communicates surprise and regret. Maybe you forgot about the stop-loss. Maybe you kept meaning to reset it. Maybe a big market swing triggered it when you weren't expecting it. Whatever the case, the automatic sale happened, and you suffered a loss.