Trade Management
Scaling Out / Partial Profit Taking
Selling a winner in pieces instead of all at once, so a gain that's already real doesn't have to survive the rest of the move to still count.
Play the position, sell it your own way
The position below is already live at entry. Hit play and the price moves forward bar by bar in real time. Click "Sell a tranche" whenever you want to lock in a piece of it, there's no right answer telegraphed in advance. Whatever you haven't sold by the last bar closes automatically at whatever price the session ends on.
How it works
- The position splits into equal tranches up front. A 240-share position sold in three pieces means three sales of 80 shares each, sold whenever you decide to click, not on a fixed schedule.
- The blended exit price is the weighted average of every sale. Sell the first third high and the rest lower and the blended price still beats selling everything at the lower price. Sell the first third low and the rest higher and it costs you the difference on that first piece.
- Every unsold share is marked at the live price until it's sold. The stat panel above recomputes the blended price and R-multiple on every single bar using the current price for whatever's still open, so the numbers are always telling you where you'd stand if you closed the rest right now.
- There's no version of this that captures the exact top. Scaling out isn't a way to sell everything at the best possible price, it's a way to guarantee that some of the gain gets banked no matter what the rest of the move does.
Where this breaks
Selling the winning shares and holding the losing ones, backwards on purpose
The honest risk isn't the math above, it's what scaling out quietly trains a trader to do over hundreds of trades: take the easy, comfortable profit on the piece that's working and keep holding the piece that's underwater "because it'll come back," which is the exact opposite of cutting losses and letting winners run. Scaling out only works as designed when every remaining share still respects the same stop it started with. The moment the stop gets moved further away to "give it room" after a scale-out instead of trailing it up, the strategy has quietly turned into an excuse to avoid taking the loss on the part that isn't a winner at all.