Guide · Risk Management
What Is a Take-Profit Order?
A stop-loss protects the downside. A take-profit does the equally important, and equally often skipped, job of locking in the upside.
A take-profit order is an instruction to automatically close a position once it reaches a specific profit target, locking in the gain without requiring you to watch the position and act manually the moment it gets there.
It's the mirror image of a stop-loss: where a stop-loss defines the maximum loss you're willing to accept, a take-profit defines the point at which you've decided a gain is good enough to bank, rather than holding out for more and risking giving it back.
Skipping a take-profit is a common way winning trades quietly turn into break-even or losing ones: without a predefined exit, it's easy to keep holding a profitable position hoping for a bit more, and watch a genuine gain erode or reverse entirely while waiting for a better exit that never comes. Setting the target in advance, when you're not emotionally attached to the specific number in front of you, tends to produce more consistent outcomes than deciding in the moment.
A stop-loss and a take-profit set together at the same time define your full risk-reward ratio for a trade before you've even opened it — which is exactly the discipline Trade2Spike's Long Term mode is built around, with its automatic 8% stop-loss pairing naturally with a target you set for yourself going in.