I’ve been working on setting realistic profit targets for my trades, but sometimes I find myself getting greedy and holding on too long, which leads to losing some profits. I know it’s important to balance risk and reward.
Any tips for staying disciplined?
It’s difficult to know where to exit a winning trade. If price has gone past recent support (for a short) or resistance (for a long) the chart will offer no very good guidance. Price will be in “clear blue sky”.
If you ensure that your position is following the main trend for this market, then the exit decision is less critical. If you exit too early the continuation of the trend should offer you another entry opportunity very soon.
This tends to be symptomatic of focusing on the single trade and losing sight of the bigger picture - i.e. your overall strategy.
It is important that any strategy should have a clearly defined exit process as well as an entry process.
It is these entry/exit processes, together with win rate, that define the positive expectancy of the strategy over time.
Therefore, if you loyally follow your strategy there can be no such errors in exit timing. You get what you anticipated and whatever happens next is irrelevant.
Afterall, most regular anglers will boast about the ones they caught and not the one’s that maybe got away… 
Warning: I’m going to continue beating the trading skills drum. 
IMO, your problem isn’t discipline, it’s a lack of chart reading experience and skill. We’ve all been there, but this is putting the cart before the horse, i.e. trying to make money trading before having the necessary skills.
In my rush to make money, I jumped immediately into trading systems and strategies. When I got into a trade, my inexperience made me focus too much on the open profit / loss and my emotions caused all sorts of stupid decisions. I spent years trying to become more “disciplined”, develop “trading psychology”, control my emotions etc.
It took me forever to realize that the root cause of my problems was that I sucked at reading what the charts were telling me.
I took break a from trading so I could focus all my free time on understanding how and why markets moved the way they did: chart reading, technical analysis, fundamental analysis, intermarket analysis, asset correlations, capital flow between asset classes etc.
When you can properly read a chart then just a simple moving average, for example, can tell you whether the trend is in a temporary pullback and will continue or is about to reverse or is going to stall and go sideways. Knowing when to exit then becomes fairly simple.
The targets are defined by the structure of the chart as well as how price moves in that moment.
Sometimes I have a clear tp and I just stick to it with an order in the market. Sometimes I leave it open and look at the greater context of the chart as well as how price is behaving.
If you believe you lack discipline, simply take 20 trades and stick to your tp by putting it into the market.
After 20 trades you can reevaluate whether it really is a lack of discipline or whether other factors are at play. Sometimes we say we are not disciplined but in fact we are trying to avoid the pain of seeing the market move further in our direction without us.
A potential remedy for that is taking partial profit at your tp and letting the rest run.
Can you tell me the positive points of setting a target?