Entries get all the content; exits make all the money. The whole course has been building one payoff shape, capped small losses against occasional multi-R winners, and the exit is where that shape is either harvested or squandered. Two failure modes bracket everything: selling everything at the first green flicker (the win-rate trap from 0.4), and holding everything until the round trip (the fade statistics from 1.1). The framework below is how practitioners live between them.
The partials framework
1/3 off at +1R → stop to breakeven. Trade is now free.
1/3 off at +2R / next structure (prior high, halt zone, round number)
final 1/3 = the runner → trailed until the trend itself breaks
What this buys, psychologically and mathematically: the first partial pays the day and disarms fear (you cannot round-trip a trade that already banked and sits at breakeven); the second locks the respectable multiple; and the runner is your lottery ticket on PLAG-day outcomes, held with house money at zero emotional cost. Andrew Aziz's published version scales out in tenths per R to +10R: same architecture, finer slices. The slicing matters less than the covenant: every exit level is written before the entry.
Trailing the runner
The final third is trailed behind objective structure, never a feeling:
- Higher lows: the trend's own definition. Each new higher low on your working timeframe becomes the new stop. The trade lives until the market itself says the trend ended.
- The 21EMA (intraday): a mechanical proxy for the same idea: momentum runners characteristically ride it (our RUN charts draw it for exactly this reason). Close below on your timeframe = runner done.
- Climax exit (the override): Lesson 1.3's signature: after a big extension, the day's largest volume with no price progress. When you see it, the asymmetry has flipped: selling the runner INTO that liquidity beats waiting for the trail, because the crowd that must buy your shares is at its maximum and about to shrink.
Time exits
- Intraday trades die at the close: if the thesis was intraday momentum, EOD is a hard exit: the overnight toll (2.5's 70% gap-down) is not your trade.
- The dead-tape exit: when volume evaporates and the name goes quiet mid-afternoon, the momentum thesis has expired even if the price has not broken: harvest and leave. Momentum trades are rentals by the hour, not leases.
- Overnight only as designed in 2.5: runners, house money, Grittani shape, sized for the gap.
- Exits are written before entries: thirds at +1R / +2R-structure / trailed runner is the default template.
- First partial + breakeven stop makes the trade unloseable: calm is a position-management output, not a personality trait.
- Trail the runner on higher lows or the 21EMA; the climax volume signature overrides the trail.
- Intraday theses die at the close; dead tape is an exit even when price has not broken.
- Nobody sells the top. Profitable AND still holding when the monster day comes: that is the whole game.
Drill: re-run five winners
Take five past winning trades (paper or real). Replay each bar by bar and log what the thirds framework would have produced versus what you actually did: where each partial would have filled, where the trail would have exited the runner. Most traders discover their instinctive exits captured less than half of the framework's result, on their own trades. After that, following the template is no longer discipline: it is greed, properly aimed.