How to avoid giving back profits from a winning trade is a great question. Unfortunately, there is no one correct answer. It depends on things such as your time frame, what you are trading and whether you are a technical trader or fundamentally based. For short term, ie day trades, I look at obvious targets,like the high of the day, week, move, etc. I would get nervous if price and an oscillator put in a decent divergence. I would look at a failure after a pullback and retest. I would think about getting out if a clear reversal bar was created. I would think about gettin gout if an indicator like a moving average or a trend line was violated. As a fallback strategy, if I had a big profit, I would not want to see more than half of it disappear. The other side of this is that if I had confirmed that a trend day was likely, I would want to stay in until the close or close to it if possible. I don't like to use a trailing stop because you always get out on weakness. It's not the worst method, but I don't like it. Some people like the parabolic indicator as an exit tool. On longer term or swing type trades, I would be looking first at a moving average on the 60 minute chart, then eventually if the trade lasted that long, for a reversal bar on the weekly chart. There is always a tradeoff between letting profits run and avoiding give back. A true trend trader realizes that they have to get the most out of those big winning trades, because typically the winning percentage on trend following systems is not that high. That's what makes it psychologically a tough way to trade. A lot of losers, then you have to hang on to the one trade that can make your year.