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A trailing stop follows price at a fixed distance, locking in profit as the trade moves. The idea feels sensible, and in strong trends it works.

In choppy markets it is a profit leak. Normal pullbacks hit the trail, ending winners early and leaving no profit when price resumes. Tight trails do this most.

The distance matters. A trail of 1 times ATR gives room to breathe. A trail of 0.3 times ATR gets hit constantly.

Some traders use structure-based trailing, moving the stop under each new swing low, which adapts to the market's rhythm instead of a fixed number.

Others skip trailing for scalps altogether, preferring a fixed target, since the move is too short for a trail to add value.

Testing is simple: take the last 100 winners and simulate how a trail of various sizes would have performed.

Which exit method has produced the best average result in the records kept here?

I ran exactly that test on my last hundred or so winners on EURUSD and the fixed target beat every trail I tried. A tight trail of about a third of the ATR was the worst by far, chopping me out of trades that went on to hit the target anyway. Even a wider trail only came close to the fixed target, it never beat it.

Where trailing did help was on the handful of trades that caught a real trend, usually around the London open after a strong Asian move. On those days a structure-based trail under each new swing low let a few trades run much further than my normal target.

So now I use both. Most scalps get a fixed target and that's the end of it. If the higher timeframe is clearly trending and the trade is already at the target quickly, I close half there and trail the rest under swing points. It keeps the steady results while still giving me a piece of the occasional big move.