Profit Targets and Timed Exits
Bots can take profits for you automatically. Set a profit target and the bot places a resting closing order, or use a timed exit to close the trade at a specific time of day.
How profit targets work
Profit targets live in the Trade Exit section of the bot editor. When a trade opens, the bot places a resting closing order at your target price and leaves it working. If the market touches your price, the order fills and the trade is done, with no decision required from you. The order does not always go in the instant the trade opens: your Profit Target Trigger setting decides how far the trade has to travel toward the target first, which keeps far-away targets from tying up buying power before they matter.
The whole cycle is visible while it runs. The position and its exit show in Current Bot Positions on the Trading Dashboard, where you can also adjust the profit target on a live trade without changing the bot's saved settings. When the order fills, the exit lands in the bot's activity log and your Trade Log.
Profit target types
The Profit Target Type buttons choose how the target price is calculated:
| Type | How the target is set |
|---|---|
| Disabled | No profit target order is placed. |
| Fixed Closing Order Target | Places the closing order at the exact dollar price you enter in Closing Order Target. |
| Fixed Net Profit Target | Sets the target in dollars relative to the opening trade price, so the order adjusts to your actual fill. |
| Percent Profit Target | Sets the target as a percent profit of the trade entry price. |
Percent targets work on both sides of the market. For a long position entered as a $2.00 net debit, an 80 percent profit target places a closing order at $3.60. For a short position entered at a $2.00 net credit, the same 80 percent target places the closing order at $0.40.
Which type fits? Percent Profit Target scales with your actual entry, so a bot whose fills vary day to day keeps taking the same proportional win; it is the natural default for repeatable premium-selling bots. Fixed Net Profit Target aims for a consistent dollar amount above or below whatever the entry was, useful when your goal is a fixed dollar income per trade. Fixed Closing Order Target ignores the entry entirely and rests the order at an absolute price, which suits trades where a specific price level, not a profit amount, is the plan.
Profit Target Trigger: when the order goes in
Your target price is one decision. When the resting order actually reaches your broker is a separate one, and it is controlled by Profit Target Trigger in Account Settings under Bot Preferences. It is an account-wide setting: it applies to every bot you run, and it is not part of any individual bot's configuration.
The choices are Immediately, or a percentage from 5 percent to 80 percent in 5 point steps. New accounts start at 20 percent. The percentage is how far the trade has to travel toward its target before the bot submits the closing order, measured as a share of the distance between your entry price and your target price. It is not a share of the target price itself.
A worked example
Take an iron condor sold for a $2.00 credit with a Percent Profit Target of 80 percent. The target price is $0.40, so the trade has $1.60 of distance to cover. Your Profit Target Trigger decides how much of that $1.60 has to be in hand before the order goes in:
| Profit Target Trigger | Order is submitted when the trade is worth | Profit captured at that point |
|---|---|---|
| Immediately | Any price, from the moment the trade opens | None yet |
| 20% (the starting setting) | $1.68 or better | $0.32 of the $1.60 |
| 40% | $1.36 or better | $0.64 of the $1.60 |
| 80% | $0.72 or better | $1.28 of the $1.60 |
So at 20 percent, a condor sitting at $1.75 has no closing order anywhere: the bot is watching, but your broker has nothing resting. The moment it trades down to $1.68 the bot submits the $0.40 closing order, and from then on the order works at your broker and can fill even if the market moves faster than any software could react.
Debit trades work the same way in the other direction. A calendar bought for a $2.00 debit with an 80 percent target is aiming at $3.60, which is again $1.60 of distance, so a 20 percent trigger submits the order once the spread is worth $2.32. The same distance math applies to the two fixed dollar target types, so switching your bot between Percent, Fixed Net Profit, and Fixed Closing Order Target does not change how the trigger behaves.
The trigger is checked fresh, every time
The bot does not remember that a trade was once far enough along. On every management pass it looks at two things: whether a closing order is already working, and where the trade is trading right now. If an order is working, it leaves it alone. If nothing is working, it re-runs the comparison above against the current price.
That matters when a working profit target order gets canceled. A few ordinary events cancel it: a stop loss going pending, saving changes to the bot while the trade is open, and a group reset. When the order comes off, the bot goes back to the same test it started with, so the order is only resubmitted once the trade is back over your trigger.
Following the condor above: the trade reaches $1.68, the order goes in at $0.40, then you edit the bot and save. The save cancels the working order. If the condor has drifted back out to $1.80 by the next management pass, no new order is submitted, because $1.80 has not cleared the $1.68 trigger. The bot keeps watching, and the order goes back in when the trade returns to $1.68 or better. Nothing is lost, but there is a stretch in the middle with no resting order at your broker, which is worth knowing if you are editing bots during the session.
Choosing a setting
A higher percentage keeps orders off the books longer. Each resting order ties up buying power and counts against your broker's working order limits, so on a busy account waiting until trades are most of the way home frees up both while trades are young and going nowhere. See 390 Order Count Monitoring for why order counts can matter.
Immediately trades that efficiency for certainty. The order is at your broker for the entire life of the trade, so a violent move through your target fills you rather than leaving the bot to catch up on its next pass. If your targets are close to the entry price, if you trade products that can gap through a price, or if you would simply rather see every exit resting at your broker, Immediately is the safer choice.
One case ignores the setting entirely. A profit target that works out to a loss, whether it came from the bot or from editing a single live trade, is submitted right away no matter what your trigger says, because a target meant to limit damage should not be waiting on the trade to improve first.
Adjust the target on a single live trade
The pencil in the profit column of Current Bot Positions opens Edit This Trade's Profit Target. Changes made there touch only that open trade: you can set a new target, disable the target for the remainder of the trade, or put a hand-edited trade back on the bot's own settings. When the bot has a profit target of its own, the new value is entered in the bot's unit, a percent for a Percent Profit Target bot or option dollars for the two fixed dollar types.
When the bot's Profit Target Type is Disabled, there is no unit to inherit, so the editor takes the new target three ways:
| Entry mode | What you enter |
|---|---|
| Percent | A percent profit of the trade entry price, the same math as a Percent Profit Target. A negative percent (for example -30) locks in a smaller loss when the trade is losing. |
| Closing Value | The option price the closing order should be placed at, in the same per-contract dollars the trade was entered at. On a $2.00 entry credit, a closing value of 0.50 closes the trade for $1.50 of profit per contract. A closing value cannot be negative. |
| Profit Amount | The profit to take, in per-contract option dollars rather than a total across every contract. On a $2.00 entry credit, a profit amount of 1.50 closes the trade at $0.50. A negative amount locks in a smaller loss instead. |
However it is entered, the trade's target is stored as a percentage. For the two dollar modes, tradeSteward works out what your amount comes to as a percent of the entry price and shows the math in a Converted to a Percent Target confirmation; nothing is saved until you accept the converted number. The stored percentage keeps three decimal places, so on a large premium the closing order can land a cent or two away from the exact amount you typed. When that happens, the confirmation also shows the price the closing order will actually go in at.
A target that works out to a loss, however it was entered, asks for one more confirmation and is checked against what the trade is worth right now: it must improve on the trade's current standing by at least 5 percent of the entry price, so a target that would fill the moment it was placed is rejected. Once confirmed, the closing order is submitted immediately rather than waiting on your Profit Target Trigger preference. A few entries are handed back to fix instead of saving: a negative closing value, an amount that works out to no profit and no loss, and an amount too large to store as a target. A trade with no recorded entry price has nothing to measure dollars against, so its target has to be entered as a percent.
Timed exits
Timed Exit closes the trade at a set time of day instead of waiting for a price. Enable it, pick the Exit at Set Time, and choose the day it applies with Exit Days in Trade or Days to Expiration:
- To Expiration counts down calendar days to the nearest expiration in the trade. A setting of 0 exits on expiration day at your chosen time, and a setting of 1 exits the day before expiration.
- In Trade counts calendar days since the position opened, which suits trades on longer dated expirations. Weekends and market holidays count, so a trade opened on a Friday is already on day 3 when Monday arrives.
Both modes count calendar days, so an exit day can land on a day the market is closed. When that happens the trade closes as soon as trading resumes, rather than at the time you set. If you are counting In Trade and want the exit on a specific trading day, add the closed days in between: from a Friday open, 3 lands on Monday.
A timed exit and a profit target work well together: the profit target takes the win when the market offers it, and the timed exit makes sure nothing is carried past the day and time you chose if the target never fills. A same-day bot might pair an 80 percent profit target with a 0 DTE timed exit late in the session, so every trade ends the day flat one way or the other.
Disable Profit Target After Stop
Profit target orders are canceled while a stop loss is pending, and normally the bot puts them back if the stop check clears or only part of the trade was closed. That resubmit goes through your Profit Target Trigger like any other, so if the trade fell back while the stop was being checked, the order returns once it is again far enough along. Turn on Disable Profit Target After Stop if you want the profit target to stay off for the remainder of the trade once a stop has filled any portion of it.
Pair your profit target with a stop so both sides of the trade are covered. See Stop Losses Explained for the other half of the exit picture, and Bot Settings: Trade Exit for every field in this section of the form.