Partial Close: A wise decision for uncertain trades
Confusion usually reigns in the mind of an average forex trader whenever forex trading turns bad. It is somewhat hard to divorce emotional impulses from actions that we take sometimes. It is the reaction of a trader to a potential loss that would determine if that loss would actually be incurred.
Traders most times take different actions to remedy a situation when forex trading turns bad. A trader may decide to hedge the trade, exit the trade with the losses already incurred, move stop loss nearer to price, partial close trade position with some profit or to just allow the trend to continue while hoping that things turns around for the better.
It is rather hopeless to keep hoping that a trade would turn around once it has gone bad. The situation can get worse, and waiting for a favorable turn around may mean waiting for more losses in reality. The best thing, or the manageable thing, to do when forex trading turns bad is to just exit with whatever is left of one's capital and hope for a better day.
Such a step would reduce the emotional turmoil that a trader may go through during that period. After exiting, a trader could then start looking for other more promising trades to enter into, but this should not be done with the aggressive mindset of recouping all that had been lost at once as this could lead to further losses. Professional forex traders are in the best position to use the hedge method because of the intricacy that accompanies it. Hedging could be sometimes disastrous if carried out by a trader who does not have much experience in how to handle the method.
Some traders do sometimes hope that things would turn out better for them after their forex trades had gone bad. This could be a total waste of time and money since such traders do not have any control whatsoever over the market situation. Such a decision would only compound their emotional woes further. Risks in trades can only be controllable or, should I say, be manageable only if a stop loss had already been specified prior to trading.
That is why a planned trading process with proper trade management is important. With a proper trading management plan in place, traders can take into account the possibilities of how the trade might turn out based on the information they have before from their trade analysis.
One of the wisest ways to prepare for an uncertain forex trade is to have a partial close strategy at hand to take advantage of the uncertain situation. Suppose that a trader is in a profit and preempts that there might be an uncertain volatility coming ahead due to news event, he can opt for a partial close strategy.
Partial close strategy is a form of trade exit management to reduce a trader’s position risk during the event of an uncertain forex market to a certain degree by exiting part of his position size of his trade. Thus, this allows him to take some profits off the table with the partial close strategy. The rest of the position will normally be trailed by another set of trade exit strategy to maximize his profits as much as possible should the market go his way.
This partial close method can be enhanced by the introduction of having a trader’s existing stop loss move to a break-even point for the remaining part of the trade position so that it becomes risk free to the trader should the market go against the direction of the trade.
The practice of moving the stop loss nearer to the price action is a nice one, but that should be with a detailed plan and specific instructions in mind. The movement of the stop loss is only prescribed if such a step had already been incorporated in a trader's strategy for trading before the start of trading, and if it conforms to the planned forex exit strategy.
The market condition as reflected in the price action or other indicator based movement determines whether to move the stop loss or not. The existence of a planned forex exit strategy such as partial close method eliminates the entire emotional tendency to want to unilaterally move the stop loss, and also makes it possible for the trader to go with the trend of things until the market trend dies out.