I'm quite patient on entering my trade, but when it comes to profit taking I'm way to quick to exit. I watch the screen and within minutes see a few points in the micro emini /es, I take it. I've noticed that if I would have held longer, I'd be more profitable. Should I force myself to set a bracket order when entering the trade, including my stop and profit target and just forget about it. This way I'm sticking to my rules. I guess I may know the answer but hard for me to implement?! Any fellow traders have this issue and how they overcame/handled it?
I once read somewhere: "if you focus on the entry you are bound to failure, plan your exit and execute it regardless anything else, then you might be doing something right". Much better if you can automate your exits so you stop worrying about it. +1 to brackets orders imho
One tip is to avoid just staring at the prices, and to keep the analytics and forward thinking going in adherence to one's approach or system. Staring at price changes tick by tick can be deceptive and hypnotizing, causing someone to do something they either weren't intending to do or for reasons they weren't intending to consider (which can lead to early exits.)
If your afraid of the trade going against you it prolly means your trading too much size. Not advice or anything but it makes sense you will wanna protect your capital.
Don't watch the trade. Only look again once an alert has gone off when stop or target is reached. This is the only way.
Plenty of good comments on here. Taking a partial profit with a quarter or half & letting the rest run works for me. This way you have a scratch, a small profit, or a free ride. Once I have a winner running I am checking the trade periodically, like every few hours, or not watching it at all. My best trades I almost forget about them until I hear "order filled'. A sure way to F up a perfectly good trade is staring at the PnL and shorter time frame chart. Once I have a winner I switch up to higher time frame to manage it.
If i had ignored the fact that my longs have reached the intrinsic value and allowed it to run further on, would have been triple digits returns since cowi lows. Selling half of it, once it does & hedging. Taking partial profit. (?) Dunno yet. Had to figure it out the real intrinsic value of ABC equity, given the potential growth etc. Anyway, you got more to learn, padawan, back to work.