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Myth, There Is a Perfect Entry

Many traders chase the perfect entry: the exact low of the move, with a tiny stop and enormous reward. They wait, adjust, and often miss trades while hoping for perfection.

Why perfect entries don't exist consistently:

- Price is uncertain, and nobody knows the exact turning point
- Tight stops get hit more often by normal noise
- Waiting for perfection leads to missing valid setups
- Hindsight makes past entries look more obvious than they were

What to aim for instead:

1. A good entry. One that meets your criteria and offers acceptable risk-to-reward.

2. A sensible stop. Placed at a logical level, not at the tightest possible spot.

3. Consistent execution. Repeating the same process, trade after trade.

4. Acceptance of imperfection. Some entries will be early, some late, some unlucky.

Practical steps:

- Define an entry zone, not a single price
- Use limit orders at the edge or middle of the zone, based on your testing
- Accept partial misses
- Don't chase if price runs away without you

Remember that profitability comes from the combination of entry, stop, target, and risk management, not only entry precision.

The pursuit of perfection often becomes a form of fear.

Aim for good, repeatable decisions rather than flawless ones.

What helped me let go of the perfect entry idea was accepting a slightly worse price for confirmation. Getting in 5 pips later after a clear structure break felt bad at first, but I stopped getting stopped out on entries that were perfect for about ten seconds. It helps to check your journal for this. Look at how many trades you missed because you were waiting for the perfect fill with a limit order that never got hit, and how many of those went on to hit your target. Most people find the missed winners add up to more than the few pips they were trying to save on each entry. A good entry is enough.

Fairman wrote: Use limit orders at the edge or middle of the zone, based on your testing

Worth checking the calendar before leaving those limits on overnight or through the morning. A resting limit at the edge of a zone is exactly the order that gets filled on a release spike, when price blows straight through the zone and keeps going. On paper it looks like the perfect entry at the extreme; in practice it's a fill at the worst moment of the day. I cancel resting entries ahead of high-impact numbers and re-place them once the reaction has settled.

Related mistake: dragging a limit order a few pips further for a better price and then watching the trade go without you. If the setup's valid at a reasonable price, take the reasonable price. A rule that helped me is that once an order is placed, it can be cancelled but never moved further away. If I think a better price is coming, that's a new trade idea and has to pass the checklist on its own. Moving the stop to match the dragged entry also changes the risk, and people rarely recalculate the lot size when they do it. So the better entry often comes with the wrong size.