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Internal liquidity means smaller highs and lows inside the leg you are trading, such as a minor swing high between your entry and your final target. Price often pauses or reacts at these levels, so many traders take partial profit there. This can reduce stress and lock in gains, and moving the stop to breakeven afterward protects the remaining position. But partials also reduce your average winner, and if your strategy relies on occasional large runners, cutting them early can lower overall expectancy. The only honest way to decide is to test it. Take your last fifty trades, record the maximum favorable excursion and where internal levels were, and compute results with and without partials. You may find that the effect is small or that it depends on market conditions. I personally use partials when the distance to the final target is large and there is obvious liquidity in between, and I skip them on short distances where the extra commissions and spread eat the benefit. Keep it a rule, not a feeling.

Testing partials against the maximum favourable excursion of past trades is the right way. In my records, partials at internal liquidity improved the win rate but lowered the overall expectancy, because the trades that reached the final target were the ones paying for everything. I now take partials only when the internal level coincides with a higher timeframe level.

I tested this on my last eighty trades on GBPJPY after reading a similar suggestion, and my result was close to the second post. Taking half off at the first minor swing high raised my win rate by roughly ten points, but the average winner shrank enough that total R over the sample dropped by about a fifth. The runners that went all the way were doing most of the work.

What I didn't expect was how much the commission mattered. On a pair with my broker's raw account, splitting each exit added a few dollars per trade, and across a busy month that was not trivial. Once I counted it, the partials looked even worse on short targets.

Where partials still earn a place for me is on the rare trade where the final target sits beyond a full day's average range. On those I take a third at the first internal high and leave the rest with a stop under the last swing. Everything else I now manage as a single position, which also made my journal far easier to read.