My first week of trading has slipped by and I'm finding something interesting. First off, my week included some good trades and some bad trades. In the end, the week ended down by almost -2%. Regardless of my trading strategy whether good or bad; I'm finding if I had a better strategy to move my trades to break-even, after moving n-pips in profit, I would be up +3.9%. That is almost at 6% swing simply by implementing a better exit strategy.
My current strategy is to move a trade to break-even as soon as possible. Sometimes this is when a trade moved 10 pips to profit other times it will be around 30 pips. It all depends on what I'm trying to do on that trade. However, the problem comes in when I have a trade going when I'm sleeping. What usually happens is I set my 50, 70, 100 pip stop-loss and while I'm sleeping the trade goes into profit by a significant amount, not enough to trigger my profit target, then the trade quickly snaps back and hits my stop-loss and instead of breaking-even I lose money.
This same issue came up when I was trading a few months ago. It came up again and again and I did not do anything about it. I don't think a simple trailing stop will fix the problem. I am trading on Oanda which does not have any type of conditional orders, which is what I need. The other alternative is to have some type of alert system when a price level is reached to where I can correctly place my stop, after waking me up! I'm not thrilled about this option because I have a day job and I can't be tired all the time. When you are trading a $500 account it doesn't quite seem worth it, however; if I could have a break-through in my trading and was making $5000 a day I wouldn't have a problem waking up a couple times in the middle of the night.
Needless to say, my number one task is to figure out how I can better manage my stops at all hours of the day and night.
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