Small profits booked fast, losses left to run

The trade goes your way and the profit on the screen is small but real. You take it. An hour later the same screen shows a loss on something else, and that one you leave, because closing it would make the number final and leaving it does not. Neither decision felt like it had anything to do with the other. Both came from the same place.

Why the two exits get decided differently

A profit on the screen is something you can still lose. That is what makes it uncomfortable to hold. Closing it turns an uncomfortable thing into a settled one, and the relief arrives immediately.

A loss on the screen is not settled yet, and that is the whole attraction. While the position is open the number can still change. Once you close it, it cannot. So the profit gets a deadline and the loss gets patience, which is the opposite of the treatment you would have given them if someone had asked you in the morning.

There is nothing unusual in that and it says nothing about your nerve. It does leave a particular shape in your records, though, and the shape is easy to measure. In your own trades it reads like this.

• Your profitable positions were held for less time than your losing ones.
• You closed a winner without reaching anything you had decided beforehand.
• You can remember the moment you decided to book the profit. You cannot remember deciding to hold the other one.
• The loser was still open at the end of the session, or it went into the next day.
• Your biggest rupee result for the month is a loss, and your biggest profit is nowhere near it.
• You had an exit in mind on the winner and closed well before it.

Counting it from your own order history

Download a month of your trade book and pair each entry with its exit, so you have one rupee result and one holding time for each position. Skip the ones you closed a leg at a time, because the holding time on a leg is not the holding time on the position.

Then split them into two columns: closed in profit, and closed in loss. Average the holding time in each column, and average the rupee result in each. Four numbers. Write how many positions are in each column next to its average, so you can see what each average is made of.

If you had picked an exit before entering any of those trades, add one more count: how many of the profitable ones were closed before that point. That fraction is against your own number, not against anything this site thinks the number should be.