Whatever can be proven to work better, overall, than the other methods one tries/tests and is also reasonably practicable?
For me, there isn't a "perfect answer" to exits. I accept that whatever method(s) I use, there will always be many specific instances where something else would have worked better on that occasion. I think a search for perfection is frustrating, too time-consuming and probably ultimately unproductive: you have to choose something that suits you, works well overall, and isn't perfect.
People vary greatly in the relative extents to which "fear of losing profit already made" and "fear of missing out on more" affect them.
For the moment, I close a proportion (almost always either one third or two thirds, depending on the entry-type) of my trades with a target (or two) determined by current volatility and let the rest run (if it will) adjusting its stop-loss manually, as it goes, above/below the most recently-formed swing-high/low on my chart.
It's a compromise, of course, but for me, that's no worse than anything else and quite a bit better than most things I've tried.
I still think about "exits" all the time, though, and would still like to improve them.
(I've also done a lot of both backtesting and parallel forward-testing of various kinds of volatility-related automated trailing stops, and always done worse, overall, with those. That's not something I think about any more.)
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