Exit Price

The exit price is the fill that ends the risk. It may be a take-profit limit, a stop, a trailing stop, or a discretionary flatten. Profit and loss are computed from entry fill to exit fill, not from high to low of the bar you wish you had sold. A stop exit in a fast move fills worse than the stop price. A limit exit may not fill if you placed it at a price the market only printed for a second. Until the exit is filled you are in the trade. Cancelling a target and "letting it run" is a decision to hold, and it needs a new exit rule immediately, not eventually.

Write the exit before the entry: where you are wrong, where you get paid, and what you will do in between. If you scale out, each partial is its own exit with its own size. After a partial, move the remaining stop only according to the plan. An exit that depends on how you feel after a green bar will be early on the winners and late on the losers, which is the exact combination that ruins a positive payoff ratio.

Judge exits by the rule, not by the extreme that printed after you were out. A stop that was hit and then reversed was a cost of the rule. Moving the stop away next time, because you remember that one trade, taxes every future trade. Review exits in a batch. If targets are rarely reached, the targets are too far or the entries are too late. If stops are usually hit by a tick and then the trade works, the stops are inside the noise. Fix the distance. Do not remove the exit.

Cancelling a stop to avoid realising a loss. The loss is already in the open position. Also counting a target you did not fill as a win because the high touched it. And exiting the whole position at the first small profit because a prior loser still stings. That is a new, worse system invented mid-trade.

Some exits are not available. A limit-down session, a halt, a gap through the stop: the exit price is then whatever the market gives you when it reopens. Plans should say so. An exit rule that assumes a continuous tape is wrong for instruments that gap. Use smaller size or an options hedge if the gap risk is the dominant risk, and do not pretend the stop line is the exit.