Ask most new traders where their target sits and the answer is a round number: 19,200 because it is round, or gold at 2,450 because it feels right. Ask a trader working from structure and the answer comes from arithmetic on the chart itself: this leg ran 80 points, this base was 40 points deep, so the projected move from the breakout is this many points, not a feeling. One of those answers survives a losing trade with a lesson attached. The other does not.
The measured move is not a prediction so much as a repeatable way to turn a pattern's own geometry into a number before the trade, instead of adjusting the target as price goes and calling it discipline.
AB=CD, the simplest version
A move from point A to point B, a retracement from B to C, then a projected move from C to D that runs roughly the same length as the AB leg, sometimes extended to 1.27 or 1.618 times that length. The ratio is a guide, not a guarantee: a projected leg that lands close to equal to the first leg is common enough to plan around, but treating the exact number as sacred is how traders talk themselves into holding a trade past where the structure actually supports it.
Pattern height projections
The same logic drives targets from ranges, flags and bases. Measure the height of the consolidation or the flagpole, then project that same distance from the point where price actually breaks out. A tight flag after a sharp rally measures its pole from the start of the rally to its high; a base measures from its low to its high. The projection is only as good as the structure it is measured from, which is why a scruffy, poorly defined base gives a scruffy, poorly defined target.
A worked example
EURUSD rallies from 1.0800 to 1.0860, a 60 pip pole, then pulls back into a tight flag between 1.0860 and 1.0845 over 15 candles. Price breaks the flag's high at 1.0850 with a strong candle. Entry sits at 1.0852. The stop goes below the flag's low at 1.0843, a 9 pip risk. On a $10,000 account at 1 percent risk, $100 divided by 9 pips at $10 a pip gives roughly 1.1 lots. The target adds the 60 pip pole to the breakout price: 1.0850 plus 0.0060 equals 1.0910. Invalidation is a close back below the flag's low at 1.0843, which means the continuation never had the momentum the pole implied.
Common mistakes in measuring
The projection is only as trustworthy as the two points it is measured from. Measuring an AB leg from a minor wick rather than a clean swing point inflates the projected distance and produces a target nobody's order flow actually supports. Measuring a flag's pole from the wrong starting candle, one bar too early or too late, shifts the whole projection by an amount that looks small on the chart and is not small in pips. A projection built during a thin session, the Asia hours on a EURUSD chart for instance, also deserves less trust than the same math applied to a London or New York move, since a pole built on light volume rarely has the participation behind it to repeat its own length.
Why the target is a zone, not a guarantee
Measured moves land roughly, not exactly, and a projected number that ignores a real support or resistance zone sitting just before it is a target working against the chart instead of with it. If 1.0910 in the example above sat right under a level that had rejected price twice before, the honest plan takes partial profit into that level rather than assuming the projection overrides it. Structure that is already on the chart always outranks arithmetic projected onto it.