I think this comes down to size. How much profit is a small winner for you? How many basis points of return on your account we talking about? How often do you get 'good setups' for a trade? How long are these (and your typical) holds? Success rate on a trade?
Your problem is psychological from training yourself in taking profits early. This is due to having painful losses and many times giving profits back after first moving in your favor. That and you don’t have a understanding of where price is drawn to.That’s why you are using a trailing stop. Reduce your size and go to higher timeframes. Set your targets at prior swing points and learn to take partials. That’s general advice and only based on my experience with myself. A more specific answer would require you posting an annotated chart. Some things can be generalized but most actionable insights are specific to an individual.
Ross Cameron had the same problem. His solution was to scale out as @deaddog says. Take a bit of profit, but let the rest run, solved his psychological hurdle he said.
One thing you can do is study your trades more to find out where are some clues or some information in the PA that can tell you that the trend is continuing and you can incorporate that into your trading system which I hope you do and you are not just trading off the seed of your pants. Or you can think of it this way. They are the winners because you cut them. Many many many winning trades end up becoming losing trades because the trader tp'ed too late. One bird even half of a bird in hand is better than two or even three birds in the forest because those two or three or even four birds can all fly away in a moment's notice and only the bird that you have in your hand is a sure thing.
Hi! It's a problem that is not going nowhere with time, I know because I have it myself. It's seems like you don't know really how to manage your trade properly and sometimes you are holding the trade too much and the price after a good profit comes back and you end up losing, and when comes your profitable trades you close too soon. When you enter a trade, you must establish clearly how you will manage it. Where you will close a part of it up to 50% and how you will trail the rest for example, if the trade doesn't hit your stop. There are no hard rules, or best rules to manage a trade and how to take profits. You must figure them out by yourself based on your strategy and what the average and best trades are giving you. Then have a rule to sell something on the average but not less than 1:2 risk/reward. And the rest to let go run with a trailing methodology.
First things first. Do you have a valid way of expecting these trades to be winners or is it just hindsight regret? Meaning - do you have a method that tells you your trade is likely to go from 0 to 20 and not just 0 to 5? Further, could putting a stop at B/E or say a few ticks locked in be something that could help you? The worst outcome then would be a scratch trade. It depends on your trading style of course, but generally, to always be shooting for homeruns means that you'll often give back medium sized profits which if you were banking would actually add up to sizeable profits. For example, I did a few homeruns in prior weeks, but over most of last week I gave up a lot of medium sized winners trying to capture a biggie. There's nothing wrong with banking profits, IMO. Just make sure they're not tiny all the time. You'll come a long way with medium sized profits. But even tiny can work if you're very consistent.
Same issue here. A long city metro bus ride can help reestablish focus and discipline. As one trader put it years ago, if riding the bus every day doesn't motivate you to win, nothing will. Having a statistically sound target based on your timeframe, such as previous day’s or week’s high or low as resistance or support or deviation in ATR from mean(Moving average) can help.
Did you try Renko Charts as help ? Usually most traders hold longer in the trades and making also less trades.
I think you have to trade other products or methods. I learned this very same thing about myself years ago and made adjustments to what I trade and how I trade. For me personally, it was far easier to change the game than to change me.
Interesting. Could you elaborate? I talked to another trader on this board who transitioned from ES futures (unsuccessful) to fixed income futures and found his success there.