Target Price Calculator: Where Your Take-Profit Actually Belongs

You've got your entry picked. You know where the trade is wrong. And then you sit there squinting at the chart trying to decide where the take-profit goes, and what usually happens is you drag it out to a round number, or to wherever looks nice, and you call that a plan.

The target price calculator flips that around. You give it your entry, your stop, and the reward multiple you want to test, and it hands you the exact price the market would have to reach for that trade to pay you 1:2, or 1:3, or 1:1.5. It's doing one piece of arithmetic: measuring the distance from your entry to your stop, multiplying that distance by the number you gave it, and projecting it out the other side of the entry.

Sounds almost too simple to bother with. It matters because of what it forces you to do first, which is decide where you're wrong before you decide what you want to make.

Try The Target Price Calculator

Working through one

Say you're long EUR/USD at 1.17000 and your stop sits at 1.16850, under the low that would tell you the setup failed. That's 15 pips of distance, sorry, 15 pips of risk, which is what that distance becomes once you've sized the position.

Ask for 1:2 and the math is 15 × 2 = 30 pips of reward. You're long, so the target goes above the entry: 1.17000 + 30 pips = 1.17300.

Ask for 1:3 instead and nothing about the trade changes except what you're asking for. 15 × 3 = 45, so the target becomes 1.17450.

Shorts work the same way with the sign flipped. Short at 1.17000 with the stop at 1.17150 is still 15 pips of risk, and a 1:2 target sits 30 pips below the entry, at 1.16700.

The only fiddly bit is pip size. On most pairs a pip is 0.0001, so 30 pips is 0.0030. On yen pairs a pip is 0.01, so 30 pips is 0.30. That's why the calculator asks what kind of pair you're on. Get that wrong and your target will be off by a factor of a hundred, which you'll notice, because it'll be somewhere the price hasn't been since the nineties.

Why the stop comes first

Most of us learn this backwards. We decide we want to make 40 pips, put the target 40 pips out, and then squeeze the stop into whatever's left over. That's picking a number out of the air and then bending the trade around it.

The stop isn't a number you choose. It's a location on the chart where your reason for being in the trade stops being true. Below the swing low, past the level that's supposed to hold, wherever it is for your setup. Once you've put it there honestly, the distance is whatever it is, and that distance is your unit of measurement for everything else in the trade.

Then the reward multiple projects out from that. It's a question, not a decision: if I want this trade to pay me double what it can cost me, where does price have to get to?

Don't shrink the stop to make the ratio pretty

This is the one I want you to watch for in yourself, because it's sneaky and it feels like analysis while you're doing it.

Your honest stop is 20 pips away. You run the numbers and the only realistic target before the next big level gives you about 1:1.5. So you go back and think, well, what if the stop were 10 pips? Now the same target reads 1:3. Look at that beautiful trade.

Nothing about the trade improved. You just moved your invalidation point into the middle of normal price noise, which means you'll get stopped out on a wiggle and then watch price go exactly where you thought it would without you. The ratio got prettier and your odds of ever collecting on it got worse.

Risk-to-reward only means anything when the entry, the stop and the target are all real places on the chart. The second you start moving one of them to improve the arithmetic, the arithmetic stops describing anything.

What the number can't see

The calculator has no idea what's on your chart. It knows the two prices you typed in and the multiple you asked for. That's it.

So when it tells you a 1:3 target lands at 1.17450, and there's a previous high at 1.17280 that price has bounced off three times in the last week, the calculator has no opinion about that. You have to go look. And that's the actual workflow: get the number, take it back to the chart, and see whether the market has any reason to hand it to you.

A few things worth checking every time:

The range that's left in the day. If the pair typically covers around 70 pips a day and it's already moved 60, asking for another 45 is asking a lot. Not impossible, days extend, but you'd want a reason. Average daily range is the cheapest reality check there is.

Highs and lows sitting in the way. If your calculated target is on the far side of an obvious level, the trade has to get through that level first. Sometimes the honest answer is that the good target is the structure at 1:2.4, not the perfect-looking 1:3 sitting past the wall. The market doesn't owe us round ratios.

How close the target sits to a level. If price is going to run into a big level and reverse, you want your target a few pips in front of it, not a few pips past. Missing a target by two pips and then riding it all the way back to your stop is a particular kind of misery you only need once.

Session timing. A 45-pip target you set at the end of the New York session has a very different chance of filling than the same target set at the London open.

The break-even win rate, and why bigger isn't automatically better

Here's the bit of math that makes risk-to-reward actually useful instead of just a thing people say.

For any reward multiple R, the win rate you need just to break even is 1 ÷ (1 + R).

At 1:1, that's 50%. At 1:1.5, 40%. At 1:2, 33.3%. At 1:3, 25%. So on paper, a 1:3 trader can be wrong three times out of four and still be flat.

Which is where the "never take anything under 1:3" crowd comes from, and I find that advice genuinely annoying, because it stops halfway through the thought. Pushing your target further out lowers the win rate you need. It also lowers the win rate you get, because price has to travel further to pay you. If moving from 1:2 to 1:3 drops your actual hit rate from 45% to 20%, you've made the trade mathematically worse while making the ratio look better.

The thing you're actually solving for is expectancy, which is just (win rate × R) − (loss rate × 1). At 45% and 1:2 that's (0.45 × 2) − 0.55 = +0.35R per trade. At 20% and 1:3 it's (0.20 × 3) − 0.80 = +0.10R. Both are positive, one is three and a half times better, and you'd never see that by looking at the ratios alone.

You can't know your real hit rate at different targets from theory. It comes out of your journal. Run the calculator on the setups you actually take, note what the 1:2 and 1:3 targets would have been, and then go back through your history and count how often price got there. That's how the number stops being a slogan and starts being information about your trading.

Reward is not profit

If the calculator gives you a 30-pip target, that's what the trade pays if it fills. It's not a forecast, and it's not what lands in your account.

Spread comes off both ends. On a 15-pip stop, a one-pip spread is nearly 7% of your risk, and on shorter-term trades with tight stops that adds up faster than people expect. If your broker charges commission, that too. And plenty of trades never resolve cleanly either way, you close half at 1:1, you trail the rest, price does something ugly in between and you get out flat. Every one of those changes the R you actually realised.

None of that makes the planned target useless. It just means the number is a plan, not a prediction.

How I'd actually use it

Chart first, always. Find the setup, then decide the entry, then find where the idea is invalid and put the stop there. Only now do you open the calculator.

Run 1:1, 1:2 and 1:3 on that entry and stop, so you've got three price levels instead of one. Take all three back to the chart and see which of them the market has any business reaching, given the levels in the way and the range that's left. Pick that one. Then size the position off the stop distance so the loss, if it comes, is whatever percentage of your account your rules allow.

And sometimes you'll do all that and look at the target and think, no chance. Great, that's the calculator earning its keep. Finding out before you're in that the entry is too late, or the stop is too wide, or there's simply not enough room left, is worth more than most winning trades. No trade is a perfectly good outcome.

Go pull up a pair you've been watching, mark the entry and stop you'd actually use, and run the 1:2 and 1:3 targets. Then look at where those levels land. I think you'll be surprised how often the pretty ratio is sitting somewhere price has no intention of going.