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How to Manage Open Trading Positions?

In this video:
00:50 Your Different Options
02:58 Low Risk Trading Approach
05:42 Don’t Forget About US Non-Farm Payrolls!

What’s the best way of managing your open trading positions? Let’s talk about that and more right now.

Hi Forex traders, it’s Andrew Mitchem here, the Forex Trading Coach and today is Friday, the 7th of August. In this video and podcast, I wanted to have a chat about a really important subject and it’s one that I discussed just last night with my clients on a live trading room webinar. I generally have a pretty full room of clients from all around the world and we get together every two weeks for around two sometimes two and a half hours of live trading. When I’m trading on my live account on my screen behind me here and my clients get to follow along and we have chats in between taking trades.

Your Different Options

One of those chats was all about how to manage open positions, you know, what to do? Really there are a couple of different options for you.

1. One, the most easiest, is to adopt a complete 100 percent set and forget strategy. That’s something that I like to try and do as much as possible. Now I use the word try because not always do I do that. A set and forget policy means that if you have your stop loss in place for a technical reason and you have your top profit in place for a technical reason, when you take the position itself based on what you see, based on your strategy, you’re happy to take that position.

I like to give the market plenty of time to work and to get towards that profit target. Now of course if the trade goes against me, I’ll get stopped at. I have a known pre-amount of risk on that trade, so for me and my examples, it’s no more than half of one percent. That’s a really good way of trading really. When I say managing your trade, you’re not really managing it, because you placed it down and you leave it.

2. Another way is to monitor each candle, so for example, if I was to take a trade on the one hour charts, I might try to look at the completion of the next one hour buy and then the next one hour buy again and make my decisions on whether I look at closing some of the trade, all of the trade, moving stops, whatever it might be depending on the look of that next bar or next candle and on the close of that.

If I was taking a buy trade on the Euro/US Dollar (EUR/USD), let’s say, one hour chart and the next buy closes really quite strong and bullish, then yeah, I’m happy to stay in the trade.

3. Next one again, really bullish, I might then just leave it through to its full profit target. If all the sudden some indecision shows and it looks like it’s then turning against me, that then could be the time to say “Hey look, it may not get to my profit target, it may now time to start closing out of that trade.”, or whatever it might be, according to your strategy.

That’s a couple of different ways.

Low Risk Trading Approach

Now as I shared with my clients last night on that live trading room webinar, I’ve taken only a handful of trades this week, around nine trades but all up I’ve had actually 18 closes so I’ve actually split some of those trades up into two closes or some even three and some just one. I’ve had 15 out of 18 profitable closes this week personally for a gain of 1.65 percent, which anywhere for me, if I’m looking with my low risk approach, somewhere between one and two percent gain consistently on average, then I’m more than happy with that. I’m on the upper side of that anyway, so far, with still today to go.

Of course, while we’re talking about today being Friday, don’t forget it’s the US non-farm payrolls later today. Always a little bit volatile, spreads wide and etc around the time, so always be really careful with any open trades that you have leading into that news announcement. It’s probably one of the real major news announcements that I sort of really do try to have trades closed at prior to that. If I have a trade open on the weekly charts or the monthly charts and I actually have a monthly chart trade open at this time, I’m just going to leave that through the non-farm payrolls, because any news announcement is very unlikely to affect that monthly chart trade, being such a longer time frame position.

But anything, if you’re down to like a daily chart or below, anything lower than that, then certainly look at getting out before that non-farm payrolls. Back to the topic of closing part positions, to me there’s nothing better than if you do take a partial close on a trade and then let’s say you have the ability to then move your stop loss into profit, there’s nothing better than to know that the very worst you can do out of that trade is to make money. Even if the trade comes back and stops you out, you’re still going to be profitable to some degree on that trade, but of course, you’re still giving that trade the option to going up to its full profit target.

That’s another nice psychological feeling part of trading. Of course if you do start closing part positions too much, then of course it does hit into those profitable trades when they get to the full profit target. It just really depends what suits you which is the best way to go. As I mentioned, I went through those trades with clients yesterday and showed them how I’ve personally managed my positions for this week.

That’s it for today. If you have any topics, anything you’d like me to discuss on future videos and the weekly podcast, send that information through to me. Just email me directly [email protected].

Don’t Forget About US Non-Farm Payrolls!

Look out for that non-farm payrolls later today. Be careful with your trading around that time.

Have a fantastic weekend. I look forward to getting back into some really good trading with you next week. Bye for now.