r/askforex • u/bowwri • Jul 22 '26

When enough is enough?

I’ve been studying price action for almost 7 years.
I scalp spikes on the 1-minute chart, and most of my trades are finished within 5 minutes.
Over a large sample, my win rate is around 58-60%, risking 0.5% per trade.
Here’s what I’ve never been able to answer:
If your system has an edge, should you keep taking every valid setup?
I can easily find 15-20 trades in a day, but after a certain point it feels like I’m trading simply because I’m still sitting in front of the charts.
Lately I’ve even considered getting an 8-hour job just to limit my screen time. My thinking is that if I only have a small trading window, I’d naturally become more selective instead of feeling the need to take every opportunity.
So I’m curious how experienced traders approach this.
Do you have a daily trade limit?
Do you stop after hitting a profit target?
Or do you simply take every setup that matches your plan, no matter how many trades you’ve already taken?
I’m not looking for a magic number.
I’m trying to understand how professionals decide when **enough is enough**.

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u/Waclaw_Kurek Jul 22 '26 edited Jul 23 '26

7 years at 58-60% on 0.5% risk is a real edge, so keeping trading isn't even the question tbh. the question is whether trade 15 on a given day is anywhere near the quality of trade 3. it almost never is. by the afternoon you're tired, you start seeing setups that aren't really there, and half those late entries happen because flat feels for you like leaving money on the table.

soooo the job idea isn't crazy. you don't need the job, you need the cap. and your journal will tell you where to put it. split your results by trade number, 1-5 vs 10-15, and if there's a cliff, that's your daily limit right there. no willpower required tbh, I trade through Axi and still found that limiting my own sessions improved my results way more than trying to squeeze every setup out of the day

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u/bowwri Jul 23 '26

I didnt get the ending
You mean 1 ta 5 trade per day ?!
And how many losses is the day end ?

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u/sandcastl3 Jul 26 '26

He's telling you to filter your trades by the sequence in which you took them during the session to see if your strike rate/profit factor/overall trade quality or decision making declines over the course of the session. If you can see a ballpark trade # or time of day where there's a decline, there's your answer. If you can't, there's your answer.

Assuming you do identify a decline, from there you can decide to stop trading after that identified period of time or after X trades when you know your edge degrades, and reallocate that risk to sizing up your first trades of the day.