Take Profit vs Trailing Stop: Fixed 53-Position Paper Cohort

The experiment: 53 paper-executed meme coin exits

Correction (September 2, 2026): These 53 fixed, strategy-selected Jul 25–Aug 2 positions were mechanically paper-executed at observed live market prices; no capital was deployed. Simulated fills omit some latency, slippage and failure risks. See the fixed-cohort methodology and paper-execution limits.

The cohort covered freshly graduated pump.fun tokens and used a mechanical rulebook mixing fixed take-profit levels, a trailing profit floor, momentum-fade detection and hard stop-losses. Exit reasons were tagged at paper close for within-cohort comparison.

Take profit vs trailing stop: results by exit type

What each exit number teaches

Fixed take-profits: small, boring, real

A fixed level (say +25%) models an exit without judgment when observed price touches it. Sixteen paper exits averaged +11% this way. Actual fills are not certain, especially in thin markets. The downside is truncation: a fixed TP sells the remaining position into the strongest part of the move, so the tested rule sold only a fraction at the first level and let the rest run under protection.

Trailing exits: where the real money was

Within the fixed, strategy-selected paper cohort, the momentum-fade category — modeled positions that armed a rising profit floor and exited when the run stalled — averaged +52.7%, nearly five times its fixed-TP average. That is an unweighted simulated comparison, not evidence of funded or population performance.

Stops: the average is worse than the median for a reason

Within the fixed, strategy-selected paper cohort, median stop-loss exit was −16.8% and average stop-loss exit was −40.1%. The difference reflects crashes that gapped through the modeled stop and outright rugs — on-chain there is no guaranteed fill price, only the liquidity that's left. This is why pre-entry screening and position sizing matter more than stop placement: the stop can't save you from a −100% event it can't outrun.

The combined take-profit + trailing-stop playbook

1. Entry: position sized so a −100% outcome is survivable (15.1% of modeled positions in this fixed, strategy-selected screened paper cohort were rug-tagged; that is not a universal rate).
2. First spike: fixed take-profit sells ~40% at around +25%. Risk is now paid.
3. Protection arms: at about +10% unrealized, a floor locks above break-even and trails every new high a few points behind.
4. Exit trigger: whichever comes first — floor touched, momentum fades, or a rug signal fires (liquidity drop, top-holder dump).

This is the ladder tested in the fixed paper cohort. The analyzer scores every token on risk inputs including authorities, LP status and holder concentration.

Methodology notes

Fixed cohort, 53 modeled positions, mechanical paper execution at observed live market prices, no manual overrides or funded orders. Exit categories are engine tags at paper close; percentages are unweighted per-position returns. The simulation does not fully model latency, slippage, transaction failure or market impact. This is one week of one market regime.