I remember when I start trading and I didn't know what I was doing. I was following the advice of some random dude who actually didn't know what he was doing too. And I didn't use a stop loss because the dude told me so. You can imagine the result was disastrous.

After some time I decided never to trade without a stop loss. And I still follow this rule. Even if the stop loss level gets hit, it is OK because I trade no more than 2% of the funds I have allocated for trading. One wrong decision no longer means a disaster for me.

Now to the question. What time frame did you trade? On the lower time frames the thing you describe (bull traps or bear traps, essentially) can happen more often than on the higher time frames.