Everyone teaches you when to buy a memecoin. Twitter threads, Telegram groups, YouTube gurus — they’ll all tell you which token to ape into next. But almost nobody teaches you when to sell. And that silence is costing you real money.
I’ve watched it happen hundreds of times. A trader catches a 10x on a pump.fun new token, screenshots the unrealized gains, posts it to their group chat — and then rides it all the way back down to zero. The buy was perfect. The exit never happened. The profit was never real.
This post is the exit strategy nobody gave me when I started. It’s the framework I wish I’d had before I turned a $12,000 unrealized gain into a $200 bag I was too embarrassed to sell. If you trade memecoins on Solana — or any chain — read this before your next position.
Why Selling Is Psychologically Harder Than Buying
Buying feels exciting. It’s an act of optimism. You’re placing a bet on something going up, and the dopamine hits before the trade even confirms. Selling, on the other hand, triggers a cascade of uncomfortable emotions that most traders aren’t prepared for.
Greed whispers: “What if it goes higher?” Even at 5x, your brain starts calculating what 20x would look like. You’ve already mentally spent the money. Selling now feels like leaving that future version of yourself on the table.
Anchoring is even more dangerous. If a token hits $0.008 and pulls back to $0.005, you don’t see a token that’s still up 400% from your entry. You see a token that’s “down” from its high. You wait for it to get back to $0.008 before selling. It never does.
Hope is what kills the rest. The token has been bleeding for three days, holders are dropping, volume is a fraction of what it was — but you hold because “it could bounce.” Hope is not a strategy. It’s how portfolios die quietly.
Understanding these biases won’t eliminate them. But naming them gives you a fighting chance. When you feel that pull to hold “just a little longer,” you can ask yourself: is this a decision, or is this greed talking? That question alone has saved me more money than any solana memecoin tracker ever could — though the tracker helps too.
The 3x / 5x / Moon Strategy
If you take one thing from this entire post, let it be this framework. It’s not perfect. No exit strategy is. But it’s simple, repeatable, and it ensures you always take profit.
- At 3x, sell 50% of your position. You’ve now recovered your initial investment plus a 50% profit. Everything remaining is house money. The psychological pressure drops dramatically.
- At 5x, sell another 25%. You’re now sitting on pure profit with a quarter of your original position still running. You’ve locked in a meaningful win regardless of what happens next.
- Let the final 25% ride. This is your lottery ticket. Set a trailing mental stop (more on that below) and let it run. If it moons, you participate. If it crashes, you already won.
The beauty of this approach is that it removes the binary “sell or hold” decision that paralyzes most traders. You don’t have to be right about the top. You don’t have to time it perfectly. You just follow the levels.
I use real-time token alerts to notify me when my positions hit these thresholds. When you’re watching 8 tokens across multiple wallets, you can’t rely on manually checking prices. Set the alerts, follow the plan, and execute without second-guessing.
Exit Strategies Compared
Not every trader will use the same approach, and that’s fine. What matters is that you have an approach. Here’s how the most common exit strategies stack up:
| Strategy | How It Works | Pros | Cons | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| All-at-Once | Sell 100% at a single target price | Simple; maximum profit if you nail the top | You almost never nail the top; high regret risk either way | Very small positions; quick flips |
| Scaled Exit (3x/5x/Moon) | Sell in tranches at predetermined multiples | Locks in profit early; reduces emotional pressure; keeps upside exposure | You’ll sell some “too early” in a massive run | Most traders; medium to large positions |
| Trailing Stop | Sell when price drops a set % from its highest point | Rides momentum; captures most of a run | Volatile memecoins trigger stops constantly; hard to execute on-chain | Experienced traders who can monitor actively |
| Time-Based | Sell after a fixed holding period (e.g., 24h or 72h) | Removes all emotion; forces discipline | Ignores price action entirely; may exit during a run | High-frequency memecoin flippers |
There’s no universally “best” strategy. But I’ll tell you the universally worst one: having no strategy at all and deciding in the moment. That’s how greed and hope make your decisions for you.
When to Cut Losses: The 30% Rule
Exit strategies aren’t just about taking profits. They’re about limiting damage when a trade goes wrong — and in memecoin trading, trades go wrong often.
My rule is simple: if a position drops 30% from my entry, I sell. No questions. No “let me check the chart one more time.” No waiting for a bounce. Out.
Why 30%? Because memecoin volatility means a 15-20% drawdown can be normal noise. But once you’re down 30%, something has likely changed — liquidity is leaving, early buyers are dumping, or the narrative has moved on. And here’s the math that most people ignore: if you’re down 30%, you need a 43% gain just to break even. Down 50%? You need a 100% gain. The deeper the hole, the more improbable the recovery.
Cutting losses early preserves capital for the next play. And in the memecoin world, there is always a next play. A good memecoin screener will surface new opportunities faster than you can deploy capital. Your job isn’t to make every trade work. It’s to make sure the losses stay small and the wins stay meaningful.
If you want to understand why this is so hard emotionally, I wrote about it in depth in The Psychology of Memecoin Trading. The loss aversion section alone might change how you think about red positions.
5 Signals It’s Time to Sell
Beyond your predetermined exit levels, there are real-time signals that scream “the party is over.” Learn to recognize these, and you’ll exit before the crowd — not with them.
- Volume is dying. A memecoin lives and dies by trading volume. If 24h volume drops below 30-40% of its peak and keeps declining for two or more periods, the momentum is gone. No volume means no new buyers, and no new buyers means price only goes one direction.
- Holder count is declining. When unique wallets holding the token start dropping, it means people are exiting — not entering. This is especially telling on Solana, where you can track holder counts in real time. If you’re using a solana memecoin tracker, set alerts for holder count changes on your active positions.
- Whale wallets are exiting. If the top 10 holders start reducing their positions, pay attention. They often have information — or at least instincts — that retail doesn’t. When whales leave quietly, it’s usually not a good sign for what comes next.
- The narrative has shifted. Memecoins ride narratives. If the meta has moved from AI tokens to political tokens and your AI memecoin is losing attention, the tailwind is gone. Don’t fight the current.
- Liquidity is thinning. If you notice increasing slippage on smaller trades, or if the liquidity pool depth has dropped significantly, it’s time to exit before you literally can’t. I break down why this matters in What Is Liquidity in Crypto, Explained.
Any one of these signals is a yellow flag. Two or more at the same time? That’s a red flag, and you should be reducing your position immediately.
The “Would I Buy This Now?” Test
This is the single most powerful question you can ask yourself about any open position:
“If I didn’t already own this token, would I buy it right now at this price?”
If the answer is no — if you wouldn’t open a fresh position at the current price with the current volume, holder trend, and narrative — then why are you still holding? The only honest answer is usually some version of “because I already own it and I hope it goes back up.” That’s not a reason. That’s a bias.
I run this test on every open position once a day. It takes thirty seconds per token, and it has gotten me out of more slowly-dying positions than any technical indicator ever has. The sunk cost of your entry price is irrelevant. The only question that matters is whether the token, right now, represents a good opportunity.
Stop-Loss Strategies for Memecoins
Traditional stop-losses don’t work cleanly in the memecoin world. Most of these tokens trade on DEXs where you can’t set a limit sell order that executes automatically. So you need to adapt.
Mental stops are the most common approach. You decide in advance: “I will sell if price drops below X.” The advantage is flexibility. The disadvantage is that you actually have to do it, and in the moment, your brain will invent a dozen reasons not to. Discipline is everything here.
Alert-based stops are the upgrade. Set real-time token alerts at your stop-loss levels so you get a push notification the instant price crosses your line. This removes the “I wasn’t watching” excuse and shortens the gap between signal and action. A solid memecoin screener with alerting is worth more than any paid trading group.
Trailing mental stops work well for your “let it ride” tranche. The rule: as price makes new highs, move your mental stop up — but never move it down. For memecoins, I use a 40-50% trailing stop on the moon bag. If the token runs from my entry to 10x and then drops 50% from that high, I’m out. I still captured a 5x on that tranche, which is a phenomenal result.
The key insight is that any stop is better than no stop. Even a loosely defined mental stop gives you a framework for action when the trade goes against you. Without it, you’re just hoping.
Taking Profits Is Not Paper-Handing
Let me be direct about this because memecoin culture has done serious damage here: selling for a profit is not weak. It’s not paper-handing. It’s not lacking conviction. It is the entire point of trading.
The people who mock profit-takers are often the same people holding a portfolio of -90% bags they’re too proud to sell. Diamond hands is a meme. It was literally created as a joke on WallStreetBets. Somehow it became an ideology, and that ideology has cost retail traders billions of dollars.
Nobody ever went broke taking profits. Nobody ever regretted locking in a 3x because the token later did a 7x. You know what people actually regret? Watching a 10x turn into a 0.5x because they were afraid of being called a paper-hand on Twitter.
Every time you sell for a profit, you’ve won. Full stop. Don’t let the culture convince you otherwise. If you want more perspective on the expensive lessons most of us learn the hard way, 7 Lessons I Learned Losing Money on Memecoins is worth your time.
My Exact Exit Framework
Here’s the complete system I use on every memecoin trade. It’s not complicated, and it doesn’t need to be. What it needs to be is consistent.
- Before I buy, I write down three numbers: my stop-loss (30% below entry), my first take-profit (3x), and my second take-profit (5x). If I can’t define these levels, I don’t take the trade.
- I set real-time token alerts for all three levels immediately after buying. I use TokenRadar for this because it tracks pump.fun new tokens and Solana positions in one place. The tool doesn’t matter as much as the habit.
- If price hits -30%, I sell everything. No negotiation, no “just one more hour.” Out.
- If price hits 3x, I sell 50%. I immediately move my stop-loss on the remaining position to my original entry price. I am now playing with house money and cannot lose on this trade.
- If price hits 5x, I sell half of what’s left (25% of original). I set a trailing mental stop at 40% below the current high on the remaining 25%.
- Once a day, I run the “Would I buy this now?” test on every open position. If the answer is no and I’m in profit, I close it.
- I check the signals: volume trend, holder count, whale activity, narrative relevance. If two or more are flashing red, I accelerate my exit regardless of where price is relative to my targets.
That’s it. Seven steps. Nothing fancy. The power isn’t in the complexity — it’s in the consistency. Most traders have heard some version of this advice before. The difference between the ones who make money and the ones who don’t is simple: the ones who make money actually follow through.
Write your exit plan before you enter. Set your alerts. And when the signal fires, execute. Your future self — the one who still has capital to deploy on the next pump.fun new tokens that surface on your solana memecoin tracker — will thank you.