A target ladder looks like a prediction. It is closer to a set of exit prices for outcomes of different sizes — and the data shows most trades resolve well before the last rung.
Across 418 measured trades, 22% reached no target at all, and only 14% reached every target on the ladder. The large majority landed somewhere in between, most commonly at one to five targets.
That shape is the whole point. If most trades completed the full ladder, the ladder would be set too close. If almost none did, it would be fantasy. A distribution weighted toward the middle is what a functioning ladder looks like.
Traders new to laddered exits often treat the final target as the objective and everything short of it as failure. That framing guarantees disappointment 86% of the time and pushes people to hold winners until they are no longer winners.
The more useful framing: each target is a place where a portion of risk comes off. The first target's job is often just to take risk off the table — moving a stop to breakeven after taking partial size converts an open risk into a free option on the rest.
Roughly one in five filled trades reached no target. These are the trades that trigger the entry, fail to follow through, and stop out. They are not anomalies or bad calls to be explained away — they are the cost of participating in setups where the winners run.
Any service that shows you a ladder without also showing how often nothing on it gets hit is showing you half the distribution. That half is where the losses live.
If a fifth of trades stop out and only a seventh run the full distance, the arithmetic only works when the size taken off at early targets is meaningful and the stop is respected on the rest. Scaling out too slowly turns frequent small wins into occasional large losses.
This is also why the hit rate alone is a poor summary. A 78% rate where most trades reach one target and stop is a very different business from a 78% rate where a third run the full ladder.
When you look at a published track record, the useful questions are: how many targets are on a typical ladder, how often is the last one reached, and how often is none reached. Those three numbers describe the strategy better than any headline percentage.
Every alert on this site is published with its full ladder and which rungs were reached, so the distribution above can be recounted from the underlying calls rather than taken on trust.
In this dataset only 14% of filled trades reached the entire ladder, so holding the full position to the last target would mean giving back gains on most trades. Laddered exits exist so that partial size comes off at earlier targets while the remainder runs.
22% of filled trades reached no target. These trades triggered their entry and then failed to follow through. A track record that does not disclose this figure is only showing you the favourable half of the distribution.
No. A ladder is a set of pre-planned exit prices covering outcomes of different sizes, not a forecast that all of them will be reached. The middle-weighted distribution seen here is what a correctly spaced ladder produces.
13 weeks of results, week by week, with the flat weeks left in.
See the weekly recapsEducational and informational only · Not financial advice · Trading is risky and most active traders lose money · Results are not typical · Past performance is not indicative of future results.