Quote from Bernard111:
Never turn a winning trade into a losing trade... also Maximum Adverse Excursion (MAE) and Maximum Favorable Excursion (MFE)
That's kinda funny actually...
I trade the er2 on an intraday trend basis, and I constructed my method to either take the original stop-out or trail at the retracement "waves" of the market.
So up until yesterday I had about 15 losers in a row, and an open trade was 3 points in the money. Because of the string of losses, to stop the pain I applied the mantra of "never turn a winning trade into a loser", so I moved my stop to break-even.
Well the now closed trade went about .5 points below break-even, and then continued in the original direction of the monster sell-off that occured yesterday. So by not following my rules I lost out on a ~$1,500/contract trade.
Anyway, with this little story I just wanted to point out that it depends, if your method is designed to catch the occasional 10-15pt trades, then you may not want to be aggressive on moving your stop to breakeven quickly (2-4 pts).
Oh, and always follow your rules.