Two traders take the identical EURUSD entry at 1.0850 with the identical 20 pip stop. One exits at a fixed 30 pip target and banks it. The other trails the stop and lets the move run to 65 pips before giving back to a trailing stop at 48. Same entry, same risk, more than double the result, and the entire difference was decided after the trade was already open. Entries get most of the attention in trading education. Exits decide most of the actual money.
The four exit types
A target exit closes the trade at a pre-set price, the classic fixed take-profit, simple and unambiguous but capped: it can never capture more than the number chosen in advance, even on a day the market wants to give more. A trail exit moves the stop as the trade moves favorably, giving up the ceiling of a fixed target in exchange for capturing extended moves, at the cost of giving back some open profit on the way out. A time exit closes the trade after a set duration regardless of price, useful when a setup's edge is genuinely time-bound, like a session-open pattern that has nothing left to say by midday. A signal exit closes the trade when the original technical reason for being in it disappears, structure breaking, momentum stalling, independent of both price and time.
Matching the exit to the setup
A range trade between two known levels suits a target exit, since the trade's entire premise is that price returns to a specific, known price and there is little reason to expect more. A breakout or trend trade suits a trail, since the whole point of catching a trend is refusing to cap it artificially at a number chosen before the trend revealed how far it wanted to go. A session-specific pattern, an Asia range play or a London-open fade, suits a time exit tied to the session's natural end. A structure-based setup, buying support or selling resistance, suits a signal exit keyed to whether that structure is still holding.
A worked comparison on gold
Gold enters long at 2,400 on a breakout, stop at 2,394, a 6 dollar risk. A target exit at 2,412 banks a clean 12 dollars, 2R, every time it is hit, no more, no less. A trail exit, moving the stop to lock in progressively more as gold pushes to 2,415, then 2,425, then 2,430, gives back several dollars of open profit on the way but can bank 25 or 30 dollars on the days gold actually trends, at the cost of banking less than the target exit would have on the days it merely pokes to 2,412 and reverses. Neither exit is superior in every case; they are simply built for different kinds of days, and knowing which kind of day the setup expects is the actual skill.
Why exits, not entries, shape the curve
Entry quality controls how often a trade starts in the right direction. Exit quality controls how much of that right direction actually gets captured, and how much gets given back on the ones that reverse. Two traders with identical, mediocre entries but disciplined, well-matched exits will consistently out-earn two traders with sharp entries and careless exits, because the exit is where most of a trade's dollar value is actually decided, not the entry.