I am sure many of you have experienced this before.
You’re in a trade either buy or sell and are making money in the green.
Your TP is right there. Price comes close to it and then doesn’t hit then moves in the opposite direction. Would you manually shut it down or would you pray it hits your tp?
Same with the sl.
I’m just disappointed i didn’t manually close my trade while profitable.
Your entry, stop loss and take profit should be made based on your analysis before you execute a trade. Keeping mind nothing works all the time, but what does is being consistent. As you analyze more and more and try to learn from your mistakes and remember what you did right, you get much better at entry, stop loss and take profit. Remember you’re trading for the long term, not one trade or session.
One of the best pieces of advice I got was don’t try to pick tops and bottoms, but pick profit areas. And to your immediate question my favorite piece of advice “Nobody ever went broke closing a trade in profit”
Everyone was like you when they first started and some even after a long time trading, torture sitting there waiting for price to move to your take profit and then 2 or 3 pips away price stutters and immediately you start :51: and beg please please just 2 more, if it goes 
when it doesn’t :17: You think it gets easier as you grow more experienced, actually I don’t believe it does, you just become more confident that whatever you do tomorrow’s another day.
what about if i said none of both 
I let my order hit my SL, but still maintain profit at overall pips (use lock profit feature, a custom sequence based on trailing ).
dont get to attract to one single order result only, fx trading is all about to keep your pips been made. which means you want to reconsider your point of view by judge your trading result only with a single order. fx trading is also another field of business, when do business there’s no way you can define your gain by one single attempt, no accuracy count based on one 2-3 trades, you may need at least 100.
The decision you make should be based on your analysis in the first place. If you have a strong conviction that the price will hit your TP, then you should not be worried when it goes in the opposite direction. When your analysis does not give you that strong conviction, then I suggest you take the profits you have made before it goes back to hit your SL.
+1 on that. When my trade is making money I protect it with a stop loss. Better to get out then turn a earning trade into a loss. Trade what is there in front of you and not what you would like to earn. Maybe you need to rework how, when and why you take profits.
Always protect profits earned as has been pointed out above a few times. I agree that it is much better to cash out 5 pips earlier than watch a 50 pip profit turn into a 50 pip loss.
Not fix for me that I have to rely on stop loss. I see my trades live . I close if their is more reverse situation for me , I do not wait SL I can save my self. Once it hit my SL that was a big loss for me my analysis was not right that time. I like manual trading because in it we can deal easily.
I usually let my TP or SL hit, once i set a level, it will let it run. This save me from watching my charts too much. If it hit, i get an alert. So i can enjoy my time with my loved ones. I trade fundamental and my trades are usually at least a few days depending on my TP. I also will move my SL to BE when i am at least many pips up.
It is a mix situation for me but I’m practising on it and working to let my SL or TP finish the trade. Many times its the emotions in me that causes the down fall and I close some position early which is not helping me in my trading.
Hi, If your floating profit reaches certain level, let say $500, you can set trailing stop. Right click on the position in MT4 and then choose trailing stop. Then, set the point to certain level. Usually I set it 150. What this feature does is it will move your stop loss to 150 points before the current price. If somehow the price drops, the SL won’t be moved, so yes you will hit SL but it still highly profitable.
I only manually close trades if my trades are profitable (but not enough to hit TP) for too long. I also use Trailing Stop to reduce the loss.
The majority of the time when I manually exited, I end up regretting it.
These days, the only time I manually exit if it’s Friday night, the markets are closing soon and price is extremely close to my TP or SL.
My exits depend on price action, for both profit or loss.
Hence i choose to close my trades manually.
Sometimes you get to see 20 to 35 pip 15 min bar candle, which are called stop hunts.
" Stop Hunts " it is in the name.
And there are even extended stop hunts in the market.
First thing i look for is price action and then calculating risk-reward.
And if i understand that price going above previous high can lead to a trend change, then my stop will be just above previous high for short trades.
I set my stops on a multiple of ATR I try to let it go to that but if I see the chart and I think it running out of steam ill manually do it.
Personally i will wait the price will touch my Take profit point or stop loss . its will better for me from psychology side . cuse if not do that , i will be anxiety in facing the pressure when trading .
There are certainly a lot of “older threads” being bumped, at the moment? Well, their age doesn’t invalidate many of them, granted …
Some of each, according (in each case) to what’s been statistically proven to be best, overall, for that type of trade.
The only certainty is that there will [I][U]always[/U][/I] be times when, with hindsight, a different method from the one you used will turn out to have been better on that specific occasion.
In the long run specific occasions don’t matter; only collective results matter.
What also therefore matters, IMO, is to keep testing, analysing, [U]keep good written records[/U], and develop a style of trade-closure that suits you and makes reasonable [B]overall[/B] sense. You can’t realistically hope to do much better than that?
Me too… ATR is a very useful proxy for expected volatility…
Lexy has it right…
No system, strategy, and approach can be infallible…
I know exactly how that feels, it happened to me a couple of times and now I just close it manually. If my target is set to +$100 and i see the price is hitting around +$80, I make peace with the anticipated +$20 I didn’t get, it’s better than to see a reversal and you are at a loss. It depends where your mindset is at that time if you want to opt for luck or take what you see you can at that time. And besides you can still make that +$20 by entering a new position immediately after you have closed your current one and depending on the direction of market at that time, you can have another successful trade making more than that $20 you let go on your previous trade. Mindset is everything in this game.
it totally depends on which trading strategy you are using also what market condition right now . so with certainly its difficult to say