Why Your P&L Should Not Be Visible While You Trade

[Fairman]

Watching your floating profit and loss tick up and down in real time during an open trade hijacks your decision-making with pure, unfiltered emotion. It's genuinely one of the most underrated psychological adjustments a scalper can make.

Think about what actually happens physiologically when you watch that number bounce. Green numbers trigger a small dopamine hit and a temptation to exit early, locking in the good feeling before it can reverse. Red numbers trigger anxiety and a temptation to exit early for a completely different reason — just to make the uncomfortable feeling stop. In both cases, you're making exit decisions based on your emotional response to a number, not based on whether the market has actually invalidated or confirmed your original thesis.

If your trading platform allows you to hide the dollar-value P&L display during open trades, use that feature. If it doesn't, at minimum, train yourself to stop staring at the number and instead focus entirely on price action and the specific levels that would tell you your setup is working or failing.

Manage the trade based on where price actually is relative to your plan — not based on whether a green or red number is making you feel good or bad in the moment. The number is a byproduct of good decisions, not an input into them.

[PTScalper]

Hi Fairman, hi traders, hi scalpers,

i got your point, but for example for my own trading forex scalping strategy it would not work.
I know, that if you plan your trades directly from charts and you will define exact TP:SL ratio, you need to keep it.
But for my own trading style i prefer to see that floating profit, because sometimes i prefer to have much more higher win rate,
than TP:SL Ratio, it simply works for me.

I understand, that everybody have its own trading style, so that why there is that difference.