Everyone talks about entries. Nobody talks about exits. In memecoin trading, the entry is the easy part — you find a token early, you buy, the price goes up. The hard part is selling. When do you take profits? How much do you sell? What if it keeps going up after you sell?
These questions paralyze traders. The result is predictable: they ride winners back down to zero because they were waiting for "just a little more." The graveyard of Solana memecoin trading is full of positions that were up 50x and closed at 1x — or less.
This guide gives you concrete exit frameworks. Not vague advice like "take profits." Actual systems with specific triggers, position sizing for sells, and tools to automate the process so your emotions do not sabotage your gains.
Why Exits Are Harder Than Entries
Before diving into strategies, understand why selling is psychologically difficult:
- Loss aversion asymmetry. The pain of selling at 5x and watching it go to 20x feels worse than the pain of riding a 5x down to 0. This is irrational — a 5x profit is objectively great — but it is how human brains work.
- Anchoring. Once you see your position at 10x, your brain anchors to that number. Selling at 7x feels like a loss, even though it is a 7x gain. Your reference point shifted from your entry to the peak.
- Narrative attachment. You researched the token, joined the community, believed in the "movement." Selling feels like betraying the cause. This is exactly how you become exit liquidity.
- FOMO feedback loops. Social media amplifies winners. When you see others posting their unrealized gains, selling feels like giving up too early.
The antidote to all of this is a pre-defined exit plan that you commit to before entering the trade.
The Scaling Out Framework
The single most effective exit strategy for memecoins is scaling out — selling your position in stages rather than all at once.
Basic Scale-Out Plan
Before entering any memecoin position, define your sell tranches:
| Milestone | Action | Rationale |
|---|
| 2x | Sell 25% | Recover half your initial capital |
| 3x | Sell 25% | Fully recover initial + some profit |
| 5x | Sell 25% | Lock in significant profit |
| 10x+ | Sell final 25% (or trail) | Let the remainder ride for max upside |
With this plan, if a token hits 3x and then crashes to zero, you still walked away with a 1.25x return on your initial investment. You did not lose money. If it hits 10x, you captured an average of about 5x on your total position — not the full 10x, but very profitable.
Aggressive Scale-Out (Higher Win Rate)
For lower-conviction plays or highly volatile tokens:
| Milestone | Action |
|---|
| 2x | Sell 50% (fully recover initial) |
| 3x | Sell 25% |
| 5x+ | Sell remaining 25% |
This prioritizes capital recovery. You are playing with house money after the first sell. The psychological relief of knowing you cannot lose money on the trade is worth more than the theoretical upside you give up.
Conservative Scale-Out (Maximum Upside)
For high-conviction plays where you have strong reasons to expect a larger move:
| Milestone | Action |
|---|
| 3x | Sell 20% |
| 5x | Sell 20% |
| 10x | Sell 30% |
| 20x+ | Sell remaining 30% or trail with stop-loss |
This keeps more exposure for longer. Only use this when you have genuine conviction — not hope, not attachment, but actual reasons (strong community, catalyst ahead, smart money accumulating).
Auto-Sell Triggers and Tools
Manual scaling requires you to be watching your positions. For memecoins that can pump and dump in 30 minutes, you might miss your sell targets. Auto-sell tools handle this for you.
BullX offers built-in auto-sell functionality directly in its trading interface:
- Take-profit orders at specified price levels or percentage gains. Set your 2x, 3x, 5x sell targets when you enter the trade.
- Stop-loss orders to protect against downside. Set a floor (e.g., sell if position drops 50% from entry).
- Trailing stop-loss that follows the price up and sells if it drops a specified percentage from the peak. This is powerful for catching extended runs while protecting profits.
Set your exit plan in BullX immediately after buying. Do not tell yourself you will set it later — you will not.
Photon provides similar auto-sell capabilities:
- Limit sell orders at target prices. Photon executes the sell automatically when the price is reached.
- Stop-loss functionality with customizable trigger levels.
- Position management dashboard that shows all your active positions with current PnL, making it easy to manage multiple memecoin positions simultaneously.
Photon's interface is particularly good for managing many small positions — common in memecoin trading where you might have 10-20 active positions at once.
Trojan Bot
Trojan is a Telegram-based trading bot with robust auto-sell features:
- Auto-sell at percentage gain. Set "+200%" and Trojan sells when you are 3x.
- Trailing percentage. "Trail 30%" means Trojan sells if the price drops 30% from any peak. If the token goes from your entry to 10x and then drops 30%, Trojan sells at 7x.
- Time-based sells. "Sell in 4 hours" for tokens where you expect a quick pump-and-dump cycle. If it has not moved by then, exit before attention fades.
The advantage of Telegram bots is accessibility — you can check and manage positions from your phone, set alerts, and execute sells without being at a computer.
Volume and Holder-Based Exit Signals
Price targets are the simplest exit strategy, but they are not the only signals. On-chain data provides leading indicators that a token is about to reverse.
Volume Divergence
The relationship between price and volume tells you about the sustainability of a move:
- Price up + volume up: Healthy trend. Buyers are aggressively entering. Hold your position.
- Price up + volume declining: Warning sign. The price is rising on less and less participation. The move is running out of new buyers. Start executing your scale-out plan.
- Volume spike + price flat/down: Distribution. Large holders are selling into buyer demand. The demand is absorbing the sells for now, but once it is exhausted, price will fall. Sell aggressively.
Track volume on Birdeye or DEXScreener. Compare current volume to the recent average. If a token pumped on 10x average volume, but volume has dropped to 2x average while price is still near highs, the move is likely over.
Holder Growth Stalling
New holder growth is the lifeblood of memecoins. When new wallets stop buying, the pool of potential buyers is exhausted.
Monitor unique holders on GMGN or Birdeye. Key patterns:
- Holder count accelerating: The token is going viral. New people are discovering and buying it. Bullish — hold.
- Holder count decelerating: Growth is slowing. The token reached most of its potential audience. Time to sell the bulk of your position.
- Holder count declining: People are selling and leaving. The narrative is dead. Exit immediately.
Smart Money Exits
If the wallets that bought early (the same smart money that signaled the opportunity) are selling, do not be the last one holding.
GMGN tracks smart money wallet activity. Set alerts for when tracked wallets sell tokens you hold. When you see multiple smart money wallets reducing their positions:
- Immediately sell at least 50% of your position
- Set a tight trailing stop on the remainder
- Do not wait for your original price targets — the information advantage has shifted
DEX Liquidity Changes
If a memecoin's DEX pool suddenly loses liquidity (LP tokens removed), exit immediately. Less liquidity means higher slippage, which means worse execution on your sells. It can also signal that the project team is preparing to exit.
Watch for LP removal events on-chain. Birdeye shows liquidity pool sizes. A drop of more than 20% in pool liquidity warrants an immediate sell or at minimum a heavy reduction of your position.
Trailing Stop Strategies
Trailing stops are the most powerful tool for memecoin exits because they solve the core dilemma: "what if it keeps going up?"
A trailing stop follows the price upward but sells if the price drops by a specified amount from its highest point.
Fixed Percentage Trail
Set a trailing stop at a fixed percentage below the peak:
- Tight trail (15-20%): Good for scalps and quick trades. You will exit quickly on any reversal. Use for low-conviction plays.
- Medium trail (25-35%): The sweet spot for most memecoin trades. Gives enough room for normal volatility while protecting against major reversals.
- Wide trail (40-50%): For high-conviction plays where you want to capture a big move. The token needs to drop significantly before you exit. More risk, more potential reward.
Tightening Trail
Start with a wide trail and tighten it as the trade progresses:
- Entry to 2x: 40% trailing stop (give it room to develop)
- 2x to 5x: 30% trailing stop (narrowing as your unrealized profit grows)
- 5x to 10x: 20% trailing stop (protecting significant gains)
- Above 10x: 15% trailing stop (tight protection, you have already won)
This approach keeps you in early volatile moves while progressively protecting larger gains.
Time-Decayed Trail
For memecoins, attention decays rapidly. A token that pumped 8 hours ago and has not made a new high is losing momentum.
Combine your trailing stop with a time component:
- If 4 hours pass without a new high: tighten trail by 10%
- If 12 hours pass without a new high: tighten trail by another 10%
- If 24 hours pass without a new high: sell the remaining position
Most memecoin pumps play out within 24-48 hours. If a token has not made a new high in a day, the attention cycle has moved on.
Psychological Frameworks
The "Already Sold" Mindset
Before entering a trade, mentally accept that you will not catch the top. Nobody sells the exact top. Your goal is to capture a meaningful portion of the move, not the entire thing.
When you sell at 5x and the token goes to 20x, your response should be: "I made a 5x profit, as planned." Not: "I missed 15x of upside." The 20x was not yours to capture — it required holding through multiple 30-50% drawdowns that could have each been the top.
The Regret Minimization Framework
When deciding whether to sell, ask yourself: "Which will I regret more — selling here and watching it go higher, or not selling and watching my gains evaporate?"
For most people, the answer is clear: watching gains evaporate is worse. A realized profit, even if smaller than the theoretical max, is infinitely better than an unrealized profit that turns into a realized loss.
The Portfolio Perspective
Stop evaluating individual trades and start evaluating your trading portfolio. Your goal is not to maximize every trade. Your goal is to maximize your total portfolio return over hundreds of trades.
If your scaling strategy captures an average of 3-5x on your winners and your stop-losses limit losses to 0.5-0.7x on your losers, you are profitable with a win rate as low as 30%. Do not sabotage this edge by refusing to sell winners because each one "could be the 100x."
Putting It All Together: Your Exit Checklist
Before entering any memecoin position, complete this checklist:
- Define position size. How much SOL am I risking? Can I afford to lose all of it?
- Set scale-out targets. At what multipliers will I sell, and what percentage at each level?
- Configure auto-sells. Set take-profit orders in BullX, Photon, or Trojan immediately after buying.
- Set a stop-loss. What is my maximum acceptable loss? Set it.
- Choose a trailing stop strategy. Fixed percentage or tightening? Set it.
- Define monitoring signals. What on-chain data will I watch? Volume, holders, smart money activity?
- Set a time limit. If the thesis has not played out in X hours/days, I exit regardless.
Write this down. Revisit it when the position is up and emotions are high. Follow the plan.
Common Exit Mistakes
Moving targets upward. "I will sell at 5x" becomes "well, it is at 4.8x, I will wait for 10x." This is how unrealized gains become unrealized losses. Your original target was based on rational analysis. Your revised target is based on greed.
Selling everything at once. Unless you have a very specific reason (LP removal, team rug), selling 100% at once is usually suboptimal. Scale out. Give yourself a chance to capture further upside while locking in profits.
Ignoring your own stop-loss. You set a stop-loss at -50%. The token drops 50%. You think "it will bounce" and hold. Now it is down 80%. Use automated stop-losses so you cannot override your own rules.
Bagholding based on community sentiment. The Telegram group is screaming "diamond hands." They have a financial incentive to keep you holding — your selling creates sell pressure on their bags. The community is not your financial advisor.
Not taking any profits on a winning trade. If a memecoin is up 5x and you have sold zero, you are making a mistake. Capture some of that gain. You can always re-enter if the setup remains strong.
Conclusion
Exit strategies separate profitable memecoin traders from those who break even or lose money despite finding winning tokens. The irony is that finding good entries is the part most traders spend time on, while exits determine actual profits.
Use scaling out as your core framework. Automate your exits with BullX, Photon, or Trojan. Monitor on-chain signals through GMGN and Birdeye for early warning of reversals. And most importantly, define your exit plan before you enter the trade — not while you are staring at unrealized gains trying to decide what to do.
The best trade you will ever make is the one where you sold "too early" and kept the profit.
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