What I think doesn't really matter. It's your plan. Your plan says nothing about moving stops or holding on once the price has reached the target. Even though your plan was very sketchy, you followed it. Therefore, it was a successful trade. The problem was you chose the wrong target. Rewriting your plan now wouldn't do much good since it's all over. But these are things to consider when you write your next one.
For one thing, you weren't specific about what you were going to do when you reached the target. For another, you said nothing about moving your stop, which, if you were not going to exit at the target, you'd probably want to do something about.
hmm so many journals nowaydays, gotta like struggle for attention. maybe i'll post gangbang porn pics tommorow. anyhow i had a good day papertrading. i spent a lot of time looking at how successful traders manage exits. turns out most of them move their stop to breakeven ASAP. many move it to be BE even before their risk has been covered by profit. anyhow i've adopted this strategy: stop is moved to BE, once 1R is covered in profit. the target is pretty much based on S/R, but if it's not at least 3x1 R/R i don't take the trade. Today worked out good. 5 trades 1) bear flag. 3R target hit +0.27 2) bear flag. BE. 3) Short on double inside bars break. I dunno why, just felt good. BE. 4) Long on close above resistance and one bar retrace. -0.06 5) bull flag. +0.22 I settled for 2R instead of 3R. Violated my rules and it did go to 3R. Basically what caused this is.. when at 2R, i would hate for it to go back to 1R, if it did I wouldnt know what to do (keep stop at BE or take profits at 1R). Next time I'll just move to BE at 1R and just wait for BE or 3R whichever comes first. There will be times when it will go to 2R and comes back to BE, which will suck but thats the rules. Total for day: +0.43 - comm. - slippage Probably tommorow will suck and I won't even post results cause it sucked. I'll try to post results no matter what though.
5 trades. 1) -0.17 2) -0.1 3) BE 4) +0.34 5) -0.13 <- a idiot for taking this one! i had a baaad feeling about it. got what i deserved. damn it. total: +0.03 O wow don't tell me this was another non-losing day. I won't know how to handle this!
Traderkay, would have thought you would have had a better day. Pretty easy trending day - opening high of 90.1, opening low of 89.35 which was broken through around 10.45am. Then just hold short while price action makes lower highs all the way through to the close. Only blip was higher low at 1pm. But 2pm confirmed continuation of downtrend better luck on the 'morrow. keep up the humour brah KB
well, well, well. 7 trades. 1) BE 2) BE 3) L -0.09, went counter-trend on a flag-like thing punished. once again don't trade patterns consisting of doji candles; they are not solid. need solid bodies to be solid. this is where i started taking shaky trades cause i felt like an idiot for going against trend and getting stopped out. 4) BE 5) L -0.07, trade pulled out of my ass 6) L -0.1, trade TOTALLY pulled out of my ass 7) W +0.25, had to cut it short a bit, sell on close total.. drumroll... : -0.01 hmm, i'm starting to believe that no matter what kind of ridiculous entries one uses (gann, fibs, patterns, murrey math, oscillators, elliott wave, astrology, tea leaves, i could go on), if he sticks to a 3:1 risk/reward ratio, he will be ok. it's a strange feeling. its almost like feeling a bit invincible, feeling like no matter what kind of dumb shit trades i try to pull, i'll come out ok cause my wins are 3x losers. hmmm. how else could it be that all of the people using above methods, make money? there's no wrong method? hmmm.