Exits
See how much of each trade's best moment you keep, what price did after you closed, and how much heat your winners sit through.
Exits
Exits compares how your closed trades ended with the best and worst moments they had while open, and with what price did after you closed them. Use it to see whether you take profits too early, give back too much, or sit through more heat than your winners need.
The page is in Analytics → Edge → Exits. It follows your active account scope, filter, date range, P&L display mode, breakeven threshold and timezone. Every value is in your P&L display unit.
The measurements
Exits reads three measurements per trade, calculated from price data for the time the trade was open and the time after it closed:
- MFE (maximum favorable excursion) is the most the trade was up while it was open. If a trade was never up, its MFE is zero.
- MAE (maximum adverse excursion) is the most the trade was down while it was open. On this page it is called heat.
- After-exit continuation is the furthest price moved in the trade's direction after you closed it, within the after-exit window.
The after-exit window is five times as long as the trade was open, at least 5 minutes and at most 4 hours. A trade held for 10 minutes is followed for 50 minutes after its close; a trade held for 2 hours is followed for 4 hours.
Which trades are measured
Market metrics exist for futures with a known contract and for forex, metals, commodity and index CFDs. Stocks and crypto have none. Under the page, a note says how many trades in the view have market metrics, for example 84 of 120 trades have market metrics, and gives one line per reason for the rest:
| Reason | What it means |
|---|---|
| Instrument type without market metrics | The instrument is not one of the types above. |
| Not calculated yet | The trade is eligible, but its metrics are still being calculated. They appear when the run finishes. |
| No price data for the time it was open | Price data for the trade's open time could not be loaded. |
| Opened and closed inside one price bar | The trade was too short for any move inside it to be measured. |
| No value in this P&L unit | The trade has no value in the active display mode, for example a second instrument class in ticks. |
| Not measured in one-lot ticks | One-lot ticks cannot express how far a whole trade moved. Sized ticks, currency and percentage can. |
The after-exit stories need price data after the close as well, so they can rest on fewer trades than the others. A second note says how many when that happens.
When fewer than 10 trades in the view have market metrics, Exits shows only this coverage: how many trades are measured and why the others are not, with the instrument types that get metrics when that is the reason. That is the expected state for an account that trades only stocks or crypto, not an error. When the trades have metrics but the active P&L display mode cannot read them, such as one-lot ticks, the page says so; switch the mode to see the stories.
The stories
The page leads with the first story that has enough trades, in this order, and shows the others as tiles under three headings.
| Story | Question | What it shows |
|---|---|---|
| Left on the table | How much of each trade's best moment do you keep? | Per trade, the MFE minus the final result, never below zero. The average and the total left, the share of their MFE your winners kept, the share of trades that closed at 80% or more of their MFE, and a column per month of the average left. |
| Losers that were green | How many losers were up a typical win before they closed red? | Losers whose MFE reached your median win: how many, their share of all losers, and how much they were up at their best together. The chart compares their average MFE with your other losers'. |
| After you exit a winner | Do your winners keep going after you close them? | The share of winners where price moved further in their direction after the exit, and by how much on average, also as a multiple of your average win. |
| After you exit a loser | Does price come back after you close a loser? | The share of losers where price moved back in the trade's direction after the exit, and by how much on average. |
| Heat on winners | How far do winners go against you before they work? | The median, the 75th percentile and the largest heat on your winners, and the share whose heat was larger than your median loss. The columns count winners by heat in multiples of your median loss: under 0.5×, 0.5–1×, 1–2× and over 2×. |
| Time to peak | When does the best moment of a trade come? | The median time from entry to the MFE against the median time held, for winners and for losers. |
Left on the table, the share your winners kept and losers that were green compare each trade's result before costs with its MFE, which is measured from price, so commissions and fees never count as money left on the table. Whether a trade is a winner or a loser still follows its net result.
Exiting early and giving back profit are one number read from two ends: both leave money on the table, so the page shows them as one story.
To list a story's trades, select Show N trades under the lead story, or any bar of a story's chart. The list shows the largest measurement first, with that measurement beside each trade's result. A bar opens the whole story's trades, not only the trades of that month or bucket. Select a trade to open it.
Confidence
These stories describe your trades; they do not test a difference against chance. A story with enough trades carries no label, and the lead story says how many trades it measured. Otherwise a label says why to read it with care:
| Label | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Not enough trades yet | Fewer than 10 trades with this measurement. The story shows as a small label under its heading. |
| Early | Fewer than 30 trades, or the result changes sign without its single largest trade. |
Limits
- Only the move in your favor after an exit is measured, not the move against you, so the page does not say how much an exit saved you.
- MFE and MAE come from price bars. A spike inside a single bar can be missed, and a trade that opened and closed inside one bar is not measured.
- In tick and point modes, only trades of your main instrument class carry a value, because ticks of different classes cannot be added up. A note on the page says when this applies.
- Results describe your history. They do not predict future trades.