How to make a wining trade as a free trade?

For long-term investment you don't need to care too much about the price movement of the stocks as long as the underlying companies' fundamentals are still sound and they are still paying you increasing dividends. But for short-term trading, the price movements are critically important, especially for those who are trading options. How many times have you seen your winning positions quickly slipper away and even made you lose money? I'm sure many of you, if not all, have such very frustrating and depressing experiences, including myself. Oftentimes we are too greedy, trying to extract each penny from the winners but in the end we become losers! Try to avoid this. Trailing stop is one effective way to help you get out if the trend turns against you. But you can also use another strategy to make a doubled or close to doubled winning position as a free trade. It is very simple but you have to be willing to do so: Sell half of your position to recoup your cost and let the other half to run as high as possible. Below is one example I just did for my option trade for AVGO. I went in a few weeks ago with 5 contracts for April calls for AVGO. It did not disappoint me as it went up with a double last week. Now AVGO was scheduled to report earnings on Thu this week. While it is widely expected that AVGO would be reporting good earnings, there is no guarantee. If it missed, all the gains I got from AVGO would evaporate immediately. Instead of trying to maximize the potential gain from it, I sold 3 contracts to guarantee that I would gain something regardless. On Thu, AVGO did report a fantastic earning report and its stock price shot up 10%. My call options went up as high as over 600%! Since I still have over a month time for the calls and there is a good chance that AVGO may continue to go up with the strong results, I could keep the 2 contracts for longer. But it would be too greedy for me and it is more prudent to take some profits from the table. So I sold another 1 contract and I intend to keep the last 1 contract as long as possible as I have got really great gain already. This is really a sound strategy to manage your winning stocks but believe me it is easy said than done. Try to overcome your greediness and get yourself paid first!