Hush lad! You can’t use the “m” word here. 
I’m in total agreement.
Totally feel you…especially lately with all the markets ranging and when a trend comes along I want to ring it out for all its worth. As long as you’re still in the black at the end of the month. I definitely feel better having to reposition myself in a trend than taking a huge hit because I gave my trade way too much space and missed a reversal. Do you use any indicators to let you know when to exit a position? Or just price action?.
I really get what you are saying. It’s a psychological thing to wrestle with. I have encountered a very similar problem and make practical changes to deal with this.
So the basis is that there is a system to try to follow, purely based on the functional level of trying to ride the trend to completion. Then the mental and psychological aspect creeps in,“I’m up, I’m in profit.” giving positive emotional feedback then the price retraces, maybe all the way to stop loss,“Oh no, I’ve lost all the money I could have had.” Now if you took the money at say 250 pips profit and the trend followed to completion then we end up kicking ourselves in frustration for missing the big move!
A method that covers all these eventualities, is to divide up the trade into 2 or 3 packs and have different take profits on each. For example, shorting the EURUSD, open 3 positions of say 0.01 Lots each, all with the same stop loss. Say trend completion is when a 1 week MA crosses or is at 800 pips, then we take one trade and make that profit 800 and forget it. The next trades can be taken early, for example, when the trade reaches a set point, say 250 pips or when we are emotionally struggling, thinking, “I want that profit now, I can’t bear to lose it”. Then we can take one profit and the other two are still going. Emotionally it is very cathartic, you can always argue to yourself you’ve taken some money if things go sour and if the trend does continue, you can still benefit from it.
Finally there are 2 trades still open, another you can take at a higher level or ratchet the stop up or take profit at 550 pips or some Fibonacci extension.
It certainly helps the psychological aspect and gives you a chance to take some profits while seeing if your system does work and get maximum profits from the big movers. One thing I do is move my stop to my entry point if my first take profit is hit, that does help a lot.
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That’s why you need to back test. It sounds like you trade the daily or weekly chart. Go back to charts of the pairs you trade and pay attention to the lenght of the moves and the length of the retracements before the end is reached. By measure the moves, you’ll get an average number of pips that price moves for that pair, for that time frame. Chances are that you put your tp beyond those points.
Take the average retracements and subtract it from the start of the move and trail by that amount of pips.
Don’t just take my word for it, backtest it and see what works. If you trade high time frames, you have to back test. It will take a long time before you have enough trades under your belt, so back test.
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As a beginner I may not fully realise the way your trading, but surely you could move your SL to a break even point and then gradually move up to capture the profits if the correction happens. My trading is generally over a day or two, and I am (at this stage) happy with 20 to 100 pips of profit on forex. Or take some profit and put on another trade in the same direction if your sure of your strategy. I guess my philosophy is some is better than none.
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