This topic has been discussed here quite a bit, lots of people operate with a $ goal in mind and quite when they hit it. I personally think it's a bad idea. The reason is that you are trading with dollars in mind, your trading is driven by p/l. To get to be a great trader, you have to trade with a different goal- to trade well. That means taking every valid signal you get and always sticking to your pre-defined trading plan. If you make that your focus, rather than money, the money will come as a result. The ultimate goal is to get to a point where you trade without thinking about money at all.
Amen. If you trade toward a daily goal you're likely to end up quitting early on what would've been your best days while fighting the bad days all the way through.
if you have a good statistics for this method then why not?In my sistems i put the goal for shorts trades(because i can't to think up better method for this ).But for long trade i use only trailing stop's with the filter and think that is bad for this case.
Yes I trade for a daily points target. It the sum of a series of small trades based on momentum in the ES morning session. Sometimes if the ES is going nowhere and is rolling between levels (my favorite type of day) I will continue trading ... not often though as I have other things to do. It requires a paradigm shift in thinking and once you see it then it is obvious. However, everyone is different thank goodness
I have volume targets. A trader MUST have targets... To keep working as hard as possible for 6.5 hours. People that quit early or whatever... are recreational traders. An actual business goes full steam during business hours.
It helps to have that "breakthrough" day where you start very strong (or just get plain lucky), and barrel forward the rest of the session without a thought to your p/l. It then gets easier afterwards to ignore your numbers and focus instead on staying in "next trade" mode. I'd recommend that you do keep an eye on your negative days however, to at least slow down if you are just out of sync. Be careful though, once you get the point where the numbers don't matter, things can get pretty crazy -- to the upside and down.
I think it's a better idea to have some general idea of the max loss you'll take. No reason to cut the winners. If you hit the max loss, it's likely that either you, your system, network or broker is misbehaving. Those sorts of sanity checks are very valuable, imo.
I agree, I have a max loss limit which I stop trading if hit. If it's a good session, I'll take all the market has to offer.