Why does your target move once the price gets near it?

Why this matters. A target that moves is not a target. It is a description of your mood, updated continuously.

You set a level. The price approaches it. And the level, which was fixed for weeks, suddenly becomes negotiable — because now there is new information, and the new information is that the price went up.

Why it happens right at the edge

Near the target, two things collide. The gain is at its largest, so the reference point is at its highest. And the decision becomes imminent — no longer a plan for later but an action for now. Imminence is what changes it: a distant rule is cheap to hold and an immediate one has a cost attached.

The rationalisation is always available and always plausible: momentum, a round number ahead, a piece of news. Any of these might be true. The suspicious part is the timing — you did not find them when the price was 8% lower.

The pattern, honestly labelled

Practitioner testimony: interview material with traders who kept long records — Ed Seykota on adherence to a system, Bruce Kovner on defining the exit before entry — converges on writing the exit first. It is testimony, not evidence: those interviews were conducted with people who had already succeeded, so what the unsuccessful ones did with the same rules is missing by construction. Treat it as data about what these people did, not proof it caused their outcome.

What makes it worth taking anyway is that it is falsifiable on you. You can check whether your moved targets did better than your original ones.

The artefact

A target-change log. When a target moves, the log records: original level, new level, the reason, and the date. Nothing else. No judgement at the time.

After twenty entries you have something no coaching can give you — your own base rate for whether moving the target helped. That is a measurable answer to a question everyone else settles with an opinion.

The log has a second use, and it is the costlier one. The invalidation condition moves too, in the other direction: the level that was going to end the position becomes a level to watch, then one it would be an overreaction to act on. Record it with the same four fields, original condition, new condition, reason, date, and keep its base rate apart from the target's. Portfolio Management holds the population version of what follows: in Odean's brokerage records (1998) the winners investors sold went on to outperform the losers they kept by about 3.4 points over the next year. Your file will say whether your moved invalidations did better than that.

Try it now

Recall the last target you moved. Write the four fields. If you cannot remember the original level, that is the finding.