Often times I feel this way, getting a entry is not difficult, it's about how you manage the trade after you enter. Where should you exit in a trending market? Or certain scenarios where it is appropriate, often I feel it's experience or chart time. Entries are built upon research and testing, but exit are built upon experience and chart time. My entries are nothing special, but if I teach my system to a new trader I doubt he would correctly exit, or even lose money if he only knew how to enter. I don't think there's a fix exit system, at least for me, you need to know when to cut losses fast, when to trail the stops, when is a good profit target, or have you maximized profits? Is there a chance that price might continue in your direction?
Yeah, my entries have been sweet recently, but Exit none existant, just letting profit go to the SL time and time again holding for big $$$$'s. Get in, first sign of trouble get out, never HOPE for it to change direction. Lesson hard learned ( Again ) this week here. And don't hold at 3pm GMT as bad news keeps coming out and market tanking badly and blowing through SL's 10x's
I sort of interpreted OP's statement as follows: Knowing where you are getting out is far more important than knowing where you are getting in. I think this is generally true. You can have a mis-timed entry - for example missing the bottom of a trend and getting in somewhere in the middle. This is completely fine. Knowing where your exit is (5 points down, 3 points up for example) is key. While having a good entry price is critical for speculation - the actual entry point is relatively flexible - at least in my experience.
To say the exit is more important than the entry is like saying the landing gear is more important than the wings. They are both important. The exit is more difficult to model because if it were as clear as the entry you would be continuously stopping and reversing.
Getting good entries is arguably all that matters in trading - at least price-based trading with no fundamental, event-driven etc component. If there's a holy grail, it's that the best trades run hard out of the gate and never spend much time in the red. How you exit is more about modulating your PnL curve than anything else - i.e. how you prefer to trade off winrate against average win size.
It depends on what you trade, if you are concentrating on one or two instruments only, then both entry and exit is important. If you are trading a wide universe of stocks, then neither is that important, selection then becomes more important.
Don't kid yourself.....entry and exit are equally important. Any slippage, commissions, etc. eat directly into your profit. I run a fully automated strategy so I use very specific rules for entry and exit. Trading highly liquid stocks I'm able to reduce slippage to near zero doing this and I'm able to keep my commissions very low (about $1 per side using IB). The other advantage is my actual trading results match my theoretical backtest results almost exactly. IB doesn't sell their order book.......I'm willing to pay $1 to avoid poor fills.