Blue Rooster

Agree, although very topic has been one promoting heated debates among day traders, swing and position traders in the past. In reality its all boils down to each individual personality. There are traders that can't sleep at night (myself included) with open positions in the market while other can't spend the required time "staring at the computer monitor" (as they put it) daytrading the markets. To each its own, I guess.

That's a good start. Just keep in mind to be successful in this business one must come up with a strategy that fits our personality, one that makes sense to you and proves to makes money in back-testing and sim-trading. We only need a trading strategy work most of the time and good money management to make a nice living out of this business. Remember as in life, nothing in here is guarantee. Stick with what works for you.

Ok, where to start? I guess by saying I'm also new here although not to trading... do I consider myself "seasoned expert"? Not really. I would say "consistent profitable trader". Khamore1 is right, nobody shouldn't start trading without a basic understanding of what it's doing, with clear goal in mind and a detailed plan of how to do it. Contrary of what most people believe, trading is a dog eat dog business where a 10% feed on the rest 90% of the participants, especially the gullible-naive-easy-to-impress newbies. Having said that, your trading approach is very similar of one of the trades I do every day (only when the window of opportunity it's present) - emphasis on every day as in daytrading not holding open positions overnight. One obvious thing, your trading strategy its seriously lacking some important steps: Why to take a trade? What's the acceptable associated risk? What the target would be? When to exit AND why? What money management approach and so on. I think you're starting to see where I'm going with this ([lease refer to paragraph above). Anything less would be considered as gambling by most traders. The 'hoping and praying" approach don't last very long in this business. There are other things that comes to mind but answering your initial question, I would have exited the long position on Thursday with a profit and then moved on to the next trading opportunity. Another approach could be get the stop to breakeven, plus commissions, targeting new R1 if your trade was already above PP on Friday. At the very least I would moved the initial stop loss above the entry price, protecting the trading capital (first rule of trading) and then trailing the stop if you will. Hope it helps.