Sounds like you didn't walk foward and there may be a bit of curve fitting going on..I would walk it foward ortakeit with a grain of salt
I build this system in 1995 and still run it every day , with small improvements. Results are consistent and it has good performance. No need to do anything anymore. Time confirmed the solidity. The 1,000 trades were spread over a 3 years period. For intraday that's enough as there were never any overnight positions. There were also more or less the same numbers of longs as shorts. So no curvefitting. The system was build and tested as it was. Only the stop was adapted to the volatility. The returns the last 2 years are much higher then the years before.
That explains what you did but the question was why? When you get an exit signal why scale out rather than a full exit. What is the downside if you take a full exit. Why keep part of a position? FOMO? You are a trader you can always get back in.
I have seen this in Stratasearch as well, shorts are a waste of time. GSB is very good intraday both long and shorts.
You're right, thx, I used to scale-out just half the position, after your point you made last year asking that, I started closing most of the position, like 80% or more. The reason I leave a little bit verses closing the entire position is mainly to remind me to trade it next time it breaks out, kind of a placeholder. I'm often trading several dozen positions at once and if I don't keep a few shares in play, I may easily forget about it
When trading, letting your winners run is hoping for the best. Hope is no plan. I mostly do the opposite of so many: I always have a large hard stop only for catastrophic events, unexpected news, market reversal, etc. Targets are placed in advance, on a price where I would not enter anymore. I exit on market order like mental stop, as soon as the behavior change (winner or loser trades). I day and swing trade that way. It is another story when investing. Investing is in fact "investing on the future", and then hoping for the best.
What's the difference with what you do? Your plan is hope too: hope to reach the target. hope not to get stopped out hope the behavior changes You can qualify everything that is not for 100% sure as hope. So plans do not exit if I follow your logic. You confuse hope with probability and expectancy.
The plan is to take the trade with the proper size and risk; to exit with a small loss or an undetermined profit. Letting winners run is the plan. Hope plays no part of it. I exit on a trend line break. If the trend continues I hold, when it breaks I exit. Of course I hope the trend continues forever but I plan to exit when it doesn't.
%% Actually if one did plenty of chart study, on qqq for example; letting profits /winners ride can work real well. So few traders make profits compared to investors\but then\ they confuse the 2. And taking profits sometimes does not disprove good trends/it can compliment it. But speaking of hope\ i hope you can admit a loss much better than the FONZ/LOL I sometimes use limit exits, but trade mostly liquid enough to use market orders