What's the Best Way to Trail Your Trading Profits? (1)

So often, many of my EA's In-The-Money positions (+40 to 50 pips) were stopped out/hunted at the price-retracement (resistance/support) level for a smaller gain (+10 to 20 pips) before the real action continued again.

As always, the EA used a fixed trailing stop algorithm to protect part of their gains. But, the disadvantage of this was giving them very little room for prices to manoeuvre in order to reach their final targets.

Below are some examples:

USDJPY 5-min 10 Jan 2008


GBPUSD 5-min 9 Jan 2008


But, I wouldn't want to change the algorithm for now as there could be a positive implication out of these case studies. Such end results might be useful for identifying important price retracement levels and perhaps, generating hidden "secondary-level"signals good for discretionary trade re-entry?

Still, this hasn't answered the main question yet - what's the best way to trail your profits? I am still unclear at present and temporarily, I have to resort to setting a moderate first target (good for 30 - 40 pips) and also a more aggressive second target (of at least 80 pips). More studies will be carried out on these topics when free.