After giving this some thought, I'm not even upset anymore. I needed this experience in order to strongly enforce the idea of letting winners run. Apparently, reading about it and having others give such advice wasn't enough, therefore it took cold hard experience in order to get the message through.
Bad example EURCHF was never on an uptrend during the last year. You may think about carry trade and that was not a good trend too.
Some may have went long because they believed the eur/chf floor would hold. They probably thought the only way it could go was up. But the signs had been that it was going down because everyone and his dog was selling it.
There are so many different ways to go about exiting, can spend weeks on how, for every trader, they would have several. My way for long term commodities took me a decade to settle into how works best for me. I have determined for every commodity instrument going back to when it first traded where price should go on average at least 30% of the time on trades where price will continue in trend, so I exit half position, my stops were adjusted to better than breakeven for losses I taken on the hedge, so there is min of 70% rest of my contracts will be stopped out at breakeven. It has taken me up to 23 tries to find extremes of certain instruments, but until I found the highs, had 3 occasions where it hit my target and rest of contracts on two occasions I got nada of the rest cause trend resumed. After I do go to breakeven, I revert to weekly charts and until price get to min of 50% of last nine years, I can't exit except for rollovers and readjust. I stay in some trades four years and counting. I experience enormous open profits equity swings, after few years pretty much ignore it and concentrate on closed profits. For me it is just a much slower way of long term commodity trading, very boring. I recently took out $4800 per on Live Cattle posted Ag Markets-Live Cattle, and just hanging with breakeven stops. You can take profit and either get into mini contract or buy options from your winning trade.
I let my losses run also. If I enter a trade it is because I am right, have done my research, and understand the future. Selling out of a winning trade because of a trading rule had me miss a lot of great gains. The research brings conviction and comfort while the blood is running. My time frames are longer.
I bet he does use margin, he leveraged his way to success. I'm better than Buffet, at least since start of 2012
? He bought an insurance company and invested the premiums. What happened in 2012 that makes that year so special? I was a hell of a lot better than him in 1987 and most of 1988, beat the pants off him 1999, probably beat him 2000 to 2009.