Today's Quote: “I've known countless people who were reservoirs of learning, yet never had a thought." - Wilson Mizner.

Continuing on targets:

As we left off yesterday, the problem for most traders lies in actually getting to the selected target. Whether you have picked a proper target or not is not even relevant if you never make an effort to get to that target. Go back over your past 30 trades. Review how many of them reached there actual ‘strategy intended’ target. Were you in the trade when it hit the target? Or did you get out? If you are like the average trader your answer is not much of a mystery. Yes I got out BUT, the market was about to tank, or I was up too much money to give back, or you can’t go broke taking a profit. These are all of the common excuses. Now how about doing some ‘fact finding?’ Make a list of all the recent trades and track how much money you would have made if you let the play go without any management. In other words, it hits the target or the stop. We call that ‘all or nothing’ trading. It is not necessarily the absolute best way to manage a position, but approximately 80% of traders do NOT beat all or nothing (AON) with their own management policy. That is an amazing statistic. Give this a try, you may be shocked.

There are two additional areas to explore. With a little more research you can help pin down problems. Tomorrow we will discuss tracking the percentage of the move that was targeted and the percentage of the target actually obtained.