The tail is the whole bet
A fixed take profit does not reduce your losses. Your stop does that.
What a fixed target actually does is cap the winners. In a tail-dependent system (breakout, trend), the rare oversized winners are the only trades that pay for all the small losers. Cap them, and you have deleted the edge and kept the losses. Log20R publishes the evidence daily, from the same entries run with fixed targets and with no target at all, and gives you a free tool to run the same test on your own trades.
The same breakouts, two exit philosophies
Simulation over the most recent 150 trading days, entries within the window, results for trades that exited in the last 90 days. Data through loading. Full method on the Method page.
Over the full window: variable ... total R against fixed 1:3 at ..., and the largest variable winner reached .... A fixed target can never print a winner above its cap, by construction. Ninety days is a small sample and any single window can favor either rule; the structural point does not change: one of these distributions has a right tail and the others do not.
Yesterday's Tails
Every trading day, the same Donchian-20 breakout entries are run three ways: fixed 1:2, fixed 1:3, and variable (no target, stop moved instead). See the full comparison, what closed on the last trading day, and the variable-rule positions still open, with their unrealized R.
Tail Capture Analyzer
Paste your own trades and see your real R distribution: how much of your result came from your top 1, 3 and 5 trades, what your total would have been with every win capped at 1R, 2R, 3R or 5R, and (with an MFE column) how much of each move you actually captured. Your data never leaves your browser.
The bet, in one paragraph
A tail-dependent trader wins about 30% of the time. Most trades lose about 1R, the amount the stop allows, or win something small. Once in a while, a trade does not stop running: 6R, 11R, occasionally near 20R. That rare winner is not a bonus on top of the system; it is the system, the single outcome that pays for dozens of small losses and leaves the profit. Two consequences follow. First, anything that caps the winner (a fixed take profit, an itchy exit finger) removes the one outcome the whole structure depends on. Second, survival is a sizing problem: at a 70% loss rate, a streak of about 10 losses in a row is close to certain over a few hundred trades, so position size has to be small enough that the streak is an inconvenience, not the end of the account, because the tail only pays the traders who are still in the game when it arrives.