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Tracking how far price went after you exited

Most journals stop at the exit. Price, result, done. But noting what happened after the exit can teach you a lot about your targets and stops.

What I record: for winning trades, how far price went in my direction after I took profit, within a set time, say an hour. For losing trades, whether price came back and would have hit my target if my stop had been wider.

Over time, patterns show up. If price regularly runs well beyond your target, your targets might be too conservative, or a partial exit with a runner could make sense. If price often reverses right after your exit, your targets might be well placed. If stopped out trades frequently come back to hit target, your stops might be too tight, or placed at obvious levels where they get swept.

The time window matters. Price will always go somewhere eventually, so without a fixed window you'll find a reason to regret every exit. An hour, or until the end of the session, keeps it fair.

This isn't about regret. It's about data. One trade where price ran further means nothing. Fifty trades where it consistently did is a pattern worth acting on.

I'd only change targets or stops after a reasonable sample, not after a single painful trade.

A simple way to record this is two extra columns: maximum favourable move after exit within the window, and whether the original target would have been hit for stopped trades. Measured in R, so it's comparable. Some people automate it with a script that reads price data after each exit time. Doing it by hand from screenshots works too, just slower. The key is applying the same window every time. Without a fixed window, every exit will look early in hindsight, and that leads to bad changes. An hour is a sensible default for most scalps.

Be careful about acting on this for stops especially. Widening stops because some stopped trades came back sounds logical, but it also increases the loss on trades that don't come back. The test is whether the extra winners outweigh the bigger losers, which needs the whole sample in R. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. Running the numbers for a wider stop on past trades before changing anything gives a much clearer answer. Sometimes the answer is that your stop was fine and those trades were just normal losses. That's useful to know as well, because it stops you fiddling with something that isn't broken.

Post-exit tracking is probably the quickest way to tune targets. If price usually goes much further after the target, the target may be too small. If it usually reverses, the target is probably close to right.

For losing trades, checking whether price reached the original target after the stop was hit shows whether stops are too tight. Both pieces of information are easy to collect and very useful for adjusting the plan.

EUR/USD, an ordinary-looking Wednesday. Price spent the early New York hours drifting toward a round number, 1.0900 for the sake of the example, and then started to stick to it. Candles opened and closed within a few pips of it. Breakout traders entered both ways and got stopped both ways, and the range tightened further as 10am New York approached.

The popular explanation is the option cut. Many FX options expire at 10am New York, and if a big strike sits near spot, dealers who hedged the option can have a reason to defend price near that level until expiry. The pinning behavior is plausible, it is discussed widely, and it fits what many people see on charts.

The twist is what happened after the cut. A move built up through the pin, but at 10:00 the tension released and price ran 30 pips away within minutes. Anyone who had treated the level as a ceiling and sold the edge was caught on the wrong side of the first real move of the session.

What the example shows is that the pin is a reason for compression, not a prediction of direction. Compression before a known time tends to precede expansion after it. The practical conclusion is more modest than the story suggests: avoid building a big position inside the pin, and treat the minutes after 10:00 as the window where the market gets to choose.

It also helps to separate days. If no obvious large strike sits near spot, the pinning idea has little to explain, and ranges at that hour are just ranges. Strike information is not free for retail traders, so the clue is often only visible after the fact.

Some brokers also widen spreads or lag feeds in the minutes around the cut, which makes tight scalps there harder to evaluate.

Has anyone logged what price does in the ten minutes after 10am New York when it was pinned beforehand, and does expansion actually follow?

Choosing the window for after exit tracking needs some care. Too short, and you miss moves that took a little longer. Too long, and almost every trade looks like it would have gone further, because price eventually moves a lot in some direction. A window similar to your typical holding time, or perhaps double it, gives a fair picture. For scalps held fifteen minutes, looking thirty minutes past the exit is reasonable. For day trades held a few hours, a few hours past the exit makes sense. Whatever window you pick, using the same one for every trade keeps the data comparable.

It helps to track this for winners too, not just for stops. If your winning trades often keep going a lot further after the target, the target might be too close. If they usually reverse soon after, the target is probably well placed. That's more useful than tracking stopped trades, since adjusting targets based on data is less risky than widening stops. A few months of this data, split by setup, can show which setups have room for bigger targets. It's also the safer direction to experiment in, since a slightly wider target costs less than a wider stop when it doesn't work out.