Fixed profit target or trailing stop: how do you exit winners?

FTC Community TeamStaff14 Sept 2026110 views

Entries get most of the attention, but exits decide how much a winning trade is worth. Some traders take profit at a fixed multiple of their risk. Others trail a stop and let the market decide. Plenty do both: close half at a target and trail the rest.

Fixed profit target or trailing stop: how do you exit winners? — drawdown and recovery diagram — An equity curve during a drawdown and its recovery

Tell us how you exit and what it does to your numbers:

your exit rule, in enough detail that someone else could follow it
how it affects your average win compared with your average loss
whether you've compared two exit rules on the same entries

Fixed profit target or trailing stop: how do you exit winners? — risk-reward diagram — A risk-reward ratio of 1 to 2

If you've never tested this, it's one of the most useful questions a trading journal can answer: take your last 50 trades and work out what a different exit would have produced.

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FT
FTC Community Team1 mo ago
A simple way to run the comparison the original post suggests, using trades you've already taken.
1. Take your last 50 closed trades and note entry, initial stop and the price path afterwards.
2. Recalculate each result three ways: a fixed target at 2R, a trailing stop (for example, below each new swing low for longs), and half at 2R with the rest trailed.
3. Compare three numbers for each rule: win rate, average win in R, and total R.
What traders commonly find is that fixed targets win more often but cap the best trades, while trailing stops lose more trades back to breakeven but occasionally capture very large moves. Which is better depends on whether your market tends to trend or reverse after your entry, which is exactly what the test shows.
Keep costs in the calculation, since holding longer can add swap. Background: risk-reward, win rate and expectancy. Members, did your own test change how you exit?
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