How does one "lock in some pips"?

I Was reading pipcrawler’s blog and saw this–

-----> “It is a little under an hour away from the close of the Euro trading session and our position is currently +40 pips. With it being the end of the week I think it would be prudent to lock in some pips. So we will close half of our trad at 155.35 to lock in about +40 pips and move the stop to breakeven on the rest of the open position to possibly catch a move down further. Good luck and have a great weekend!”

<-- is he just talking about adjusting the stop/limit to guarentee a positive return or is there a way to liquidate a partial position?
thanks in advance for feedback!

Looks like he’s talking about selling off (or buying back) part of an existing position. You should be able to do that buy simply initiating a reverse trade for half the amount, if I’m remembering right.

For example, if you’re long on EUR/USD by 100 units, you might sell 50 of those units to take profit on half your position.

This is done also using 2 profit taking(Pt) position as seen on Pip crawlers blogs as pt1 at 155.10, pt2 at 154.65. Like stated by genghisclown you would sell/buy back half your position size at/near pt1 and sell the rest at/near pt2 later on.

Basically Pip Crawler would have set a ‘limit’ at pt1 generally he closes half his position at his pt 1 this is to prevent your from losing to much should the market turn against you he then will set his stop at his BEP (Break Even Point) which (i stand 2 b corrected) would be the price he originally shorted at…155.75.

Take a look at his previous trade “Pick of the Day: NZD/USD - Trade Closed” (on the 15 March 07) you can see what he is doing, that trade went bad after pt1 was hit and he limited losses by do this.

Catch ya lata

i think i understand, thanks guys

I personally like moving the stop loss to lock in the profit.

I personally like moving the stop loss to lock in the profit.

:smiley: Same.

Moving the stoploss to breakeven as soon as you’ve made back in profit what you’ve risked…then at least you have a free trade.