So I have a profitable trade at the moment. My TP is like 55 pips from my entry. My SL was 26 pips from my entry. I’m about 35 pips in profit right now on EURJPY.
What do you all do with your SL? Like when do you move it to break even or even higher? Do you stick to your guns waiting for your TP to hit or what? Maybe it depends on if you’re watching the charts?
I think I want to move it up pretty high to maybe the next nearest low. Is that leaving profits on the table?
Thoughts?
For me the whole question of tactics here depends on whether the position is with the trend or counter-trend. If its trend-following I move the SL to b/e as soon as profit equals the capital risked: but there is no TP, so the trade is free to continue to move with the trend. After this point I ratchet the SL according to TA.
If the trade is counter-trend I have a TP at 1r so I exit as soon as profit equals risk.
Oh that’s great stuff. Different approach based on the environment. That’s a big help tommor.
There is no easy answer as none of us know what would happen next. To move the S/L to breakeven and scalp off 30-50% of the profit and let the balance continue is one approach while keeping an eye on the balance price movement. At worst, the balance gets stopped out for zero.
However, some top pro traders move the S/L to breakeven and also add another position to the winning trade. Enjoy the ride. (ETR).
What’s the thinking with adding another position? Just that price looks like it’s going the way they thought?
This is one sticky question to address
If your take profit (TP) is 55 pips away, I recommend calculating 60% of that distance, which is 33 pips. Then, when you make a profit of 33 pips, adjust the stop loss to breakeven. I suggest 60% because it’s beyond the halfway point, and experiencing a drop from 60% into profits and being underwater might make me go on tilt. However, if I’m at breakeven, I may still remain calm, even though it is still emotionally painful to endure.
Another option is to hedge 70% of your position when you’ve made a 33-pip profit to secure some profits. For the remaining 30% of your position, you can either aim for breakeven at the entry price or let it reach the original target of 55 pips.
The benefit is that you can increase your proft potential without increasing your rsk.
Suppose your long position is say £1 per pip, and you have a 26 pip Entry-SL distance. When your gain reaches +£26, you can move the SL to the Entry price and add another £1 per pip position, with its SL also at the original trade’s entry price. If price falls both positions will be stopped out and you will lose £26: but if price rises another 26 pips, you will have a gain of £52 for a risk of £26.
The dream is to keep doing this every time price rises 26 pips. The most you can lose is always £26. But there is no limit on what you can gain. My best effort was an initial trade plus 6 additionals. I did this on 3 different markets for my best ever year.
Top pros have money. Therefore when they trade a winning trade they jump aboard for a free ride.
The appropriate timing to move your stop loss to breakeven (BE) or better on a profitable trade depends on your individual trading strategy and risk tolerance. Generally, once a trade has moved in your favor and gained a predetermined profit target, consider adjusting the stop loss to the entry price (BE) to secure profits and reduce risk. Alternatively, some traders prefer to use trailing stop orders to protect their gains as the trade continues to progress favorably. Key factors to consider include market volatility, the trade’s potential for further growth, and your overall trading plan. Always assess each trade’s unique characteristics and adapt your stop loss accordingly to optimize your risk management.
Secure your investment shut be your top priority, so as soon as you can move SL to BE do it and take whatever the market gives you, and invest your profit from there or let the SL ride behind your trade, but again secure your investment shut be your top priority 
i trail the stop-loss manually just beyond the most recently formed swing-high (for short trades) or swing-low (for long trades) without reference at all to where break-even is, so my first adjustment to the stop-loss, when a trade’s moving the right way for me, can be either below or above break-even, depending on price movements
this instinctively makes sense to me because the market doesn’t know and isn’t influenced by the point at which i happened to enter a position, so i see no intrinsic logic in focusing on my break-even point
more importantly than that instinctive feeling, though, is the fact that i’ve extensively backtested, forward-tested and experimented and proven to my own satisfaction that that’s overall the most profitable way for me to do it without compromising on safety
that approach works much less well for me
i was very slow to learn this
i completely understand the attraction of doing that, and i can’t fault the logic in any way (being as security-conscious and risk-averse as i am!) other than that it works less well for me
i struggled on and off for years with this question, which i think is both really difficult and really important, but i must say that “i haven’t looked back” since eventually resolving it in the way i’ve described above
to word that slightly differently, i spent a very long time trading sub-optimally (he says with hindsight!) because i moved the stop-loss to breakeven as soon as i felt i reasonably could (“too early”!)
when i changed my mind about it, my win-rate reduced slightly (only slightly!) exactly as you’d expect, but my profit factor increased more than enough to compensate for that
my conclusion: sometimes “intuition” is a very bad guide! (mine was, anyway)
(the break-even/entry level is still relevant to me, though, in the sense that i very, very rarely add to the position until my SL is beyond it, so my risk is almost never more than it was when i originally opened the trade, and often less)
I debated replying here because I use a very wide SL and really don’t pay much attention to them after I’ve set them, and most people around here don’t trade like that.
Honestly, 35 pips is not far enough away in my trading to even consider moving it, you’re pretty much guaranteeing a BE trade, unless it spikes in your direction and hit your TP.
I currently have 3 long trades open on USDCAD, they’re in profit by 59, 89 and 106 pips and I never even thought about the SL(which is almost 300 pips away) until I read this thread.
Now saying that, I don’t use TP’s either and a lot of my trades are closed manually at less than 1:1R, but since I trade with the long term trend I have lots of confidence in my direction with a high win rate, so R;R’s are of little value to me anyways.
Sorry if this is not helpful, but I thought I’d throw it out there anyways.
it is! at the very least it’s a good demonstration that even among successful traders, there’s no “one size fits all” on this question
I understand you, but keep in mind that day trading and swing trading are two very different approaches to short term investing and the SL or be topic can not be compared.
My answer was from how i am day trading and ues the SL and BE 
i do not swing trade and if i did then i can not use the SL and BE as i do now i n my day trading.
Before i enter a trade i know exactly my targets, so my first target will be a BE target or i trade out for a profit of x pips and i use the x pips to enter the market again but that is normal setup as pending order(s)
Looks like it! Like @flamingoproxy says,
Yea, I mean in this specific case, I was already past the 50% TP mark, so my brain is telling me, is it worth another 15-20 pips to potentially lose 35 pips if price falls back to BE.
But I guess then if that happens, my original TP was bad. Which goes to @tommor s point of whether it needs to be set anyway. Personal preference I guess.
this is part of the reason there’s no “one size fits all”, lol - i very rarely use a TP, because almost all my trades are trend-following 
I wonder if this is similar to @AmericanTrader 's current strategy over in
that adds more and more smaller positions. Maybe the thinking is the same, trading off the original entry and move to BE.
I mean is this like a day trading scenario or even with longer term trades (longer than a day), where they add to the position? I guess it doesn’t matter from a time frame perspective.
I don’t think Oanda offers this in the US. Let me do some digging.
i’ve been wrong before, certainly, but i’ll be amazed if that’s so 
Oanda is (by their own very open admission) a counterparty market-maker (albeit a very good one), and they love their customers to use automated trailing stops
(i trail manually, anyway - after exhaustive backtesting: i always do better without an automated trailing-stop)
I feel this actually makes more sense, doesn’t it? I know from a risk management perspective, we’re taught as noobs to trade 1% of your acct balance, or .5% or no more than 2%, or whatever, but maybe that number needs to be combined with whatever the chart and market structure shows.
I’m using the Tradingview desktop app, and only have a two check boxes, one for SL and one for TP. Maybe it’s TV that’s the problem.
I don’t think I’ve actually looked at that thread. I saw the reference to scalping and skipped past it straight away. People who talk about scalping are either far better traders than I am, or far worse but don’t know it yet.
