What would you do in this situation? It's always tough to figure out if you should exit or hold once you are in the green. What is the best way to make this type of decision?
First of all, your exit decision should always be planned prior to entry. Simply, to avoid situations like this that requires you to ask anonymous forum members about what they would do, you should already know if you've reached your profit target or not. Yet, if you're the type that likes the 'wild west" on your exits...scale out (bank some profit) and let the rest ride with a profitable trail stop. With that said, I use a lot of market context and you not showing (blacken out on your chart) the name of the trading instrument prevents using market context to help with the exit strategy because there's a lot more to profitable trading than just looking at a chart. P.S. The chart shows 2/11 on the bottom axis...is that February 11th ?
Once you had the exhaustion candle (to the left of the red arrow down), you should have put in a sell-stop if it went below the doji immediately after the exhaustion candle. That's considered "agressive" by some, but not to me. Your take profit is up to you. I'm very *conservative*, but it's your choice if you want to hold back to last major support. You just have to bear in mind that it could create a higher-low and then you're fooked or you'll get stopped out. I hope it works out for you.
I totally agreed with you on the exit comment. But the "context" comment, I'm not so sure. Do you mean "discretionary factors"? Yeah, I also thought it somewhat lame that he blacked out what the instrument was. But in the end of the day, a chart is a chart, at least for me.
Before the trade I plan on either taking a scalp or holding for a bigger profit depending on how things unfold. On this trade I thought it was tricky because the big-picture trend is down, but the 1-min chart we are looking at has a double-bottom in play which has not been invalidated yet. So I think the correct answer would be to take the scalp profit (because of the double bottom). I'm basing that on being all-in on the trade from the beginning & wanting to use a tight stop.
Since price made a Secondary low, and price closed above a Pivot high, I have it as uptrend and be looking to take longs.
You said it yourself: LT trend is DOWN. Just by knowing that you have a MUCH higher probability going short. My favorite vehicle is the EURJPY. I sometimes trade the 5 min charts, but prefer 15 for intraday. 1-minute results in more RISK than the possible REWARD is worth. The moment you click buy or sell, you are taking on risk. Might as well try to put it in your favour as much as possible.
Is there necessarily a best way to trade this? I suspect not. All that can really be done is to have a plan and stick to it. So from the chart only and no other considerations: I'd have preferred a long entry just below the 96.33 level rather than a short entry just above, as there are signs of a possible reversal. Given the short entry and that price has since continued down I'd hold for a more significant move down as there is potential for a large drop below the 96.33 level for modest risk. On the other hand there has been buying below 96.33 so if price moves up then I'd exit quickly and find something else to trade. Stop at 96.50, hold for a move down below 96.20