Was hoping for a little help. I’ve been on a great winning streak the past week or so. knock on wood. But I’ve left hundreds of pips of profit on the table by closing out winning trades to soon. I’ve been doing a great job of picking a winning trade and setting a great take profit but then I find myself closing the trade when I get up $150 or $200 instead of letting it go to my take profit(which it does eventually hit). I have this paranoia that Id rather take the guaranteed $150 instead of risk losing it all with my trade reversing. Does anyone have any advice on how to maximum profits? Would love to hear from the community.
Well that is a dilemma. If you close the trade sooner you may miss a greater profit. But if you don’t you may have no profit at all.
What I personally do is that I scale out. When my trade reach a first target, I take out half of the lots for a small profit.
Then I close the other half only if something big happened and is likely to make a longer-term reversal.
All traders face the same issue, but at the end of the day, it is always better to land profits. You could stagger the exit, ensre that you get some profit and let the trade play out.
I would rather take profit while it’s there than to lose it all by wishing there was more. I think that’s what makes a successful trader in the long run.
If you’ve got confidence in what you’re seeing - maybe back off position size a little bit - and let it run to TP. This way maybe you won’t be scared of ‘losing’ of what you’ve already gained. And just maybe gain more confidence in letting the winners run to your expectation.
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just 2 cents worth Good Luck.
I always aim for a fixed R:R ratio that’s been optimised from backtest results. If the trade goes your way, you’ll almost always going to leave extra pips on the table. Since I’ve based my system on stats, I don’t feel bad.
You could trail your stop loss instead of using a take profit or manually exiting trades. I use parabolic sar to trail my stops. Every new bar has a dot placed above or below it, which is where you move your stop loss to until you finally get stopped out with a profit. This method of trailing stops doesn’t really work in choppy sideways moving markets. But when the market’s trending, it helps me capture most of the move most of the time. I found that changing the step setting from 0.02 to 0.035 helps me to capture more of the move without stopping me out too early. Well, good luck.
In addition to projecting your entry, take profit, stop loss, using a trailing stop as mentioned above and facing what every trader faced who’s around for more than a week or two, review all your trades after your session or whenever you can devote the time to go back and see where you you exited and what happened in between the time you closed and the next time you traded. Lots of traders say, I left 30 pips on the table by leaving to soon, but when you look at what happened totally from the time you stop trading to start trading again, you might find out on average you didn’t leave as much as you thought you did. Having said that, when I first had the same question, a trader from here told me don’t worry, as your confidence grows through trading, you will be leaving less on the table. But basically I found when I stay in or leave early and over time it shows that was the right thing to do, I feel like a genius, when it doesn’t work out. . .I feel like an idiot.
