Tag Archive for: Patience

When is enough profit enough?

I’m not talking about your daily target, or the line you draw in your trading plan before the session starts. I have those too. Mine is 2% a day, with a soft trigger at 80% that asks me whether I’d rather lock it in and walk.

That question is easy compared to the one I actually want to talk about.

The one that gets asked mid-trade.

The moment

You’re in. Stop placed, target set, risk defined. The trade moves. Then it really moves. Suddenly you’re +2R. The candles are doing what you said they would do. You’re 90% of the way to TP and the only thing left is the final push over the line.

You wait for it.

And then, without warning, the market swings violently back the other way. Not all the way to your stop. Just enough to give back most of what was on the table. By the time you’ve registered what happened, you’re closer to break even than to your target.

Now you’ve got nothing to do but sit there and ask yourself the question you should have asked five candles ago.

When you’re 90% of the way to your TP, the last 10% is the most expensive bit of the trade.

We treat the target as a finish line

This is the trap. The plan said TP at this level. So anything short of it feels like quitting early. Like cheating ourselves. Like the version of us that took +1R last week and then watched the trade run for another 3R is going to show up and tut.

But the target was never a finish line. It was a hypothesis. A best guess at where price might go if the structure played out the way we read it. The market hasn’t read the plan. It doesn’t owe us the last 10%.

We know this. We say it back to ourselves all the time. Then we hold anyway.

The most expensive 10% in trading

Here’s the maths that always feels uncomfortable.

When you’re 90% of the way to your TP, the last 10% is the most expensive bit of the trade. You’re risking 90% of locked profit to capture another 10% of move. The reward-to-risk inside that final stretch is upside down. You wouldn’t take that as a fresh setup. You’d never enter a trade with 9R of risk for 1R of upside.

But because you’re already in, and because the profit feels like it isn’t yours yet, you accept the trade-off without noticing you’ve taken it.

That’s the part we miss. We tell ourselves we’re being patient. We’re actually taking a brand new, badly priced trade on top of the one we already won.

3 Opportunities to take profit before getting stopped out.

Base hits add up

There’s an idea trading culture borrows from elsewhere. That every entry has to be the big one. The full extension. The screenshot trade. The home run that makes the week.

It doesn’t.

A run of clean base hits at +1R, +1.2R, +0.8R is a perfectly good week. It’s a great year. Most of the equity curves I respect were built on base hits, not on the chase for the occasional 5R that gets posted.

Taking the partial isn’t selling yourself short. It’s collecting on the work the trade has already done. The next one is allowed to be ordinary too.

Some exits are mapped before the trade starts

A lot of this work happens before the trade is even live.

If you’ve done the Path to Profit work, you already know what sits between your entry and your target. The FVGs that might cause a stall. The opposing liquidity sitting just before TP. The big opposing candles where prior intent is still visible.

Those aren’t just risks. They’re also the most honest places to take something off. A partial at the FVG. A move to break even before the opposing liquidity. A full exit when the path beyond looks crowded.

The decision is always calmer when the chart is.

Trailing helps, when it can

The honest answer is that trailing the stop is what we should be doing. Locking in some of the move as structure gives us room to. Moving to break even when the trade clears the first leg. Tucking the stop behind a new swing low when one forms.

This works. Some of the time.

The rest of the time, structure doesn’t give us anything to trail to. The leg is too clean, the move is too vertical, the next swing point is further behind than we’d ever want our stop. Trailing in that situation either gives back all the profit or sits in a place that does nothing useful.

In those trades, the trail isn’t an answer. It’s just a comfort blanket that hasn’t been put to work yet.

The question we’re actually avoiding

What we don’t ask ourselves, in that moment when we’re +2R and the candle is looking heavy, is the only question that matters.

What does this trade still owe me?

Not what’s on the chart. Not what the plan said. Not what the screenshot of the winning version would look like if it played out perfectly.

What does it still owe me, from here, with the information I now have?

Sometimes the answer is real. Structure is building, momentum hasn’t broken, the next level is right there. Hold.

Other times the answer is uncomfortable. The move has already happened. The candles are smaller and rounder. There’s no obvious reason for the next leg. Price has done what we asked of it, and we are now just hoping.

The trade doesn’t owe us anything else. We are the ones still asking.

 

Sitting with it

I don’t have a clean rule for this. I’m not sure a clean rule exists.

Some days I take the partial too early and watch the trade run without me. Some days I hold past the point of reason and give it all back. Both feel bad. Neither feels like progress on the day it happens.

What I’m trying to do, slowly, is just notice the moment. The one where I stop watching the trade and start willing it forward. That moment is the answer to the question, even if I don’t always act on it.

Enough profit is enough when the trade has done what I asked it to do, and I’m now asking for more than the chart is willing to give.

I don’t always get that right. I’d rather get it wrong honestly than dress it up as a system.

What an A+ Setup Looks Like on the Indicator

Silver futures, just after 10am London time. The 1-minute chart had been grinding lower into the session. Bearish bias was there on the higher timeframes, and the indicator was painting a five-point sequence I’ve now seen play out enough times to know what to look for.

The trade ran 1.58R with effectively zero drawdown.

But the result isn’t the point. The setup is. Most sequences that print on the indicator are fine. They work often enough. The A+ ones look different, and once you’ve watched a few play out, you stop being willing to risk real money on the average ones.

Here’s what made this one A+, walking through it in roughly the order it printed.

The geometry has to make sense first

Before anything else, I’m looking at the distance between Step 3 and Step 5.

Step 3 is the swing low we want to see break out of the zone. Step 5 is the deeper swing low that completes the bearish structure, the furthest point from the zone before price heads back toward our liquidity at Step 4. A short distance between (3) and (5) means the pullback is shallow and the R:R gets compressed before you’ve even started.

This trade had room. Step 5 sat a meaningful distance below Step 3, which meant any pullback back up into Step 4 had to be substantial. A substantial pullback means a deeper entry, a tighter stop relative to the target, and a setup that’s worth taking risk on. If the geometry’s wrong, nothing else on the chart matters.

The depth of the Step 4 tap

The second filter is how price interacts with the Step 4 zone.

What I want to see is a clean sweep of (4) and an immediate rejection, not a deep mitigation well beyond (4). On this trade, price came back into the zone, wicked (4), and turned. That’s the indicator’s job, to observe, track and display these sequences as they play out, and it did it.

What made it A+ rather than just acceptable was what other confluences we could observe around that tap. The rejection came off a bearish fair value gap (FVG), an unfilled imbalance left by an earlier full-bodied bearish candle. So it wasn’t just price sweeping the liquidity at (4) and turning. It was price sweeping liquidity, hitting fresh bearish imbalance from a candle that had real intent behind it, and refusing to push through.

That’s not a coincidence. That’s sellers showing up exactly where you’d expect them to.

The Flip and what sits around it

The Flip is my entry trigger, the moment the indicator confirms a structural break in the direction of the original bias. On its own, it’s a signal. With the right context around it, it’s a different category of signal.

What I want to see around The Flip

Two things gave this one extra weight.

First, fresh bearish FVGs started forming right after The Flip. Multiple of them. That tells me the move down isn’t a one-candle reaction, it’s a sequence with momentum behind it. Each new FVG is an unfilled gap, and unfilled gaps are evidence that price is moving with intent rather than chopping.

Second, The Flip printed below both the 50 and 100 EMA. This one’s a hard filter for me in bearish setups, and I’ve built it directly into the indicator. If The Flip is above the 50 EMA, I’m probably looking at a counter-trend reversal, and counter-trend trades are a different beast. Below the 50 EMA, in an already bearish higher-timeframe context, means I’m taking continuation in the direction of the trend. The old adage holds up here, the trend is your friend, and on this setup everything was pointing the same way.

Execution becomes easy when the setup is right

Here’s the part I want to be honest about. When the setup is genuinely A+, execution stops being the hard part.

On this trade, I set my entry exactly on the flip line. There was zero drawdown. Not “almost zero,” literally none, because price had already committed to the move before The Flip printed, and the entry sat at the boundary of that commitment.

When price pushed close to 1R, I moved my stop to break even. That’s the rule, and it didn’t require any negotiation with myself. Target was Step 5, same as always.

After a minor pullback (the kind that always shows up and always feels worse than it is), price continued down. Two more fresh bearish FVGs formed on the way. TP hit cleanly.

The trade took care of itself, because everything that needed to be true at entry was already true.

A+ setups are filters, not formulas

The reason I keep using the phrase A+ instead of just “valid” is that the indicator will give you valid signals all day long. A large percentage of them will work. The job isn’t to take all of them.

The job is to wait for the ones where the geometry, the conditions of the sweep, the quality of the rejection, the freshness of the imbalance, and the EMA position all line up the same way.

You won’t get many of these every session, sometimes only 1 or 2 a week.

That’s fine. The discipline is in the waiting, not the trading.