When "all the stars are aligned" and you have placed a trade (plus the target and stop orders if they apply to your trading methodology), what do you do next? I think this is a somewhat neglected aspect of trade management, so let's try to gather some commonsense rules onto this thread. As for myself, I am trading based on price and volume alone, and the method I use is primarily based on waiting the price to come to me. This is the easy part. The difficult part is deciding if I should stay in the trade or not. My approach to reaching that decision is somewhat related to hypothesis testing of statistics: Assuming that I am correct (null hypothesis or H0), the market should not do this and that (hypothesis H1). An extreme outcome is that my stop is hit, which shows that the null hypothesis was obviously wrong, but often the market gives signals indicating H1 before that, too. Other approaches?
Before you get in, you should already have decided under what conditions (both going your way and not) you will get out under.
Q: What do you do when you have opened a trade? A: After I enter a trade I run away from my computer screaming then hope for the best, and let it work itself out.
I usually smoke a few bong hits, rub one out and then go for a walk. You might consider a target, stop loss level before you put it on you mook!
Are you saying that whatever happens to the price after your entry is irrelevant? It's either stop or target no matter what? As for myself, I have a pretty good idea of how the price should behave assuming I'm right at the entry. What I'm looking for is a refutation of this assumption (in which case I exit immediately). My decision tree thus covers three scenarios, one of which is highly discretionary.