Entry Price

The entry price is the fill, not the level you admired and not the close of the signal bar. A stop order to buy a breakout fills at the next available price, which can be worse than the trigger. A limit order fills at the limit or better, and sometimes does not fill at all. The planned entry and the actual entry diverge by the spread and by slippage. Your risk and your reward have to be recomputed from the fill. A trade that was a 3-to-1 reward at the planned price can be a 1.5-to-1 reward at the price you actually got, and it may no longer be worth holding.

Decide the order type with the entry, not after. A breakout that you need to be in uses a stop or a marketable limit, and you accept slippage. A pullback you can afford to miss uses a limit, and you accept the misses. Record the planned price and the fill. The difference, over a month, is part of the system's cost. If the average slippage consumes the average profit, the setup is not tradable at your size, whatever the chart says.

Place the entry where the invalidation is near enough that the size is meaningful. Chasing a bar that has already travelled most of the way to the target is an entry problem, not bad luck. If you are late, the right action is to wait for the next pullback or to skip. Improving the entry by a small amount, a limit on the retest rather than a buy of the high, often does more for the account than finding a new indicator.

Judging the setup by the planned price after a bad fill. Also moving a limit order repeatedly toward the market and calling it discipline. You converted a limit into a chase. And averaging the entry because the first fill is underwater, which creates a new, larger position at a new price. That new price needs its own stop and its own size check.

In fast markets the entry you see on the chart is not available. The bar's close is a print that already happened. Backtests that fill you at the signal close overstate results unless they include a slippage assumption. Live entry is a distribution of prices. Track that distribution or you will think your execution is free.