I'd love to challenge the dogma of having a high risk reward ratio. Is this necessary to be a profitable trader? I've been trading live for almost a year and a half now, and I've only started to be consistently profitable when I ceased trying to allow my winners ride so that I could acheive a risk reward ratio of state 3:1 for example. Was give most of my profits straight back to the market. I don't have a problem cutting my losses short, as I've noticed that the huge majority of my profitable transactions are in profit straight away. I've never felt the necessity to hold on trusting the market will come back, so getting out of a losing hasn't been an issue. I don't believe a trader is giving into fear if he or she chooses to take a profit almost straight away. In reality it appears that the additional price moves from entrance, the less likely you'll be to hit your goal. This is known by the fact that systems with is going to get a win% than systems with greater T/P. I don't think that it's necessary to have a ratio where you risk 100 pips to gain 10, but I see no reason why something closer to 1:1 would not operate on a normal basis.