Cutting winners early: write both exits before you enter
An open profit reads as money you already own, so every tick against it reads as a loss. That is why the small win feels like relief and why intending to hold never survives the moment.
Is this you?
- —You take profit well before your written target.
- —You feel relief on exit, then watch it run without you.
- —Your losers get more room than your winners.
- —Your average win is smaller than your average loss.
Two or more of those and this is the state costing you the most, not the strategy.
What it actually costs
This one quietly inverts your edge. A strategy with a positive expectancy becomes a losing one if the right tail is cut by hand, and no amount of win rate compensates for it.
The protocol: Winner-Tolerance Reset
Trigger — You are green and you notice the urge to "just take it here."
- 1.Hands off the mouse. Say: "This is discomfort, not information."
- 2.Read your exit condition out loud from your plan. If you cannot find it written, you do not have one.
- 3.Name the one thing price must do for you to exit early — a level break, a time stop, a structure failure. Nothing else counts.
How long — Two minutes per occurrence.
Read the full protocol, success test and what to do if it fails →Do this in your next session
Before your next entry, write the partial level and the mechanical trail. Set both orders the second you are filled, then take your hand off the mouse. Score whether the exits that happened are the exits you wrote.
Not sure this is your state?
The quiz takes two minutes, needs no sign-up, and names your top three protocols out of the fourteen.
Keep reading
Work it through with the Coach
Describe your last bad trade. It names the state, picks the protocol and gives you the exercise to run before the next session. Free to use.