One of the most significant elements of currency trading has to do with monitoring your exit strategy. It involves understanding your risk tolerance as well as a fundamental understanding of how the market works. Forex accounts have a report that is called "Realized Profit/Loss" and this report shares with you just how much money you have made or lost on each trade. Many charting packages offer a feature that shows you "Unrealized Profit/Loss" on your charts. This is real time money that you are either making or losing on your open positions. Until your trade is closed you have not made or lost anything. So today we are going to learn how to "Realize those Profits."
Assuming you have a trading system in place and you know how often that trading system produces a winning trade for you, and then the next step is to get a better picture on how to exit your trades in order to take advantage of profitable trades. The most notable way to exit trades is to realize that timed news releases often cause a period of volatility that is unexplained by any fundamental or technical analysis and for the great majority of traders; we should be out of the market. Take your profit or loss before the news and go for a walk, take a nap or get something to eat. Just do not trade during the news or for at least 4 hours after it has been released.
Trailing stops are perhaps the best way to protect winning trades from becoming losers, however, when using a trailing stop you must allow for small retracements or you will find yourself with a huge number of neutral trades that only make money for your broker. Let us look at an example from the EUR/USD.
You open a long position on the pair at 1.3010 based on your trading system and set a stop at 1.2980 which represents your risk management position. Almost immediately the currency pair moves up to 1.330 and you are feeling pretty good. You believe the pair will continue to move up but you do not want to lose any money at this point and so you move your stop to the break even point at 1.3010. The currency pair stalls at this point and trades sideways for a few time periods but your indicators still point to a larger upward move. As the next major market opens, new traders come in and take some profits forcing the price down until you are stopped out of the market and wind up with a neutral trade. In the next few time periods the price continues its upward move like you guessed but at this point you are sitting on the sidelines.
This type of scenario happens all the time because our risk strategy and our emotions do not work together. If you truly believed the trade would continue then let it ride until you have you reward portion locked. For example, your current risk/reward ratio is 2:1 because you know that your system produces winners 50% of the time. So in this case with a stop set at 30 pips you would need to profit by 60 pips in order to meet your money management guidelines. However, you pulled out early by taking the risk off of the table and ruined the possibility of allowing your trade to work in your favor. Once you have developed a strategy that is working for you, let it work and allow the numbers to take you where you want to go. Do not try to force winning trades and never hang on to losing trades beyond your risk tolerance.
In conclusion, every trader has their own particular methods and habits, even when trading with the exact same rules as others. Understanding your own level of risk/reward and following it within your trading system, will allow you to let your winners run and curtail the losers with minimal losses.
How Forex Trading Works is a resourceful website that serves to deliver free, online content relating to Forex trading, to anyone and everyone.











