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An open trade when you suddenly have to leave the desk

Doorbell, phone call from family, a kid who needs something now. You're in a scalp and suddenly you can't watch it. What do you do?

Decide this in advance, because in the moment you'll do whatever feels easiest, and that's often leaving a trade open with no stop or a stop you haven't checked.

My rule is simple. If the stop and target are already set at the server and the trade is behaving normally, I can walk away and let it run. If I've got a mental stop, or I was going to manage it by hand, I close it before leaving. Even at a small loss. It takes two seconds.

The bit that took me a while: being OK with the close. It feels annoying to close a trade that might have worked. But a trade nobody's watching, with no real stop, is not the trade you planned. It's a different, worse trade.

If you trade around family or a day job, having stops set at the server from the start makes all of this easier. Then leaving is just leaving.

I also turned off the habit of checking the phone app every two minutes while away. The stop's there. Watching it doesn't help.

One related thing: news. If you leave and a scheduled release is coming up in the next half hour, the server stop might be hit with slippage, or the spread might jump. If I know I'll be away through a release, I close regardless of how the trade looks. The release calendar is part of the decision, not only whether the stop is set. Unscheduled stuff you can't plan for, but the scheduled stuff you can. If something unexpected happens while I'm gone, that's fine, it's what the stop is for. Being away during a scheduled release I knew about is a mistake I can avoid.

For people who trade with an EA running alongside manual trades, check what the EA does if you're away and it opens something. If it trades on its own, fine, that's what it's for. If it's a semi automatic tool that waits for you to confirm or manage, it might sit there with a position half handled. I'd either let it run fully automatic with proper stops or switch it off when I step away. Half handled positions are the worst of both worlds. Nobody's really in charge of them, and they're usually the trades that end up in the journal with a note saying 'not sure what happened here'.