is it bad to exit a trade before your stop loss is hit

If the trade is not going according to your plan you should exit it before your stop loss is hit. Example if you want to buy a stock for $100 and set your stop loss at $90 then the moment you clicked the buy button the price didnt even try to go up.

Instead the price immediately started falling towards your stop loss like -$99, -$98, -$96, -$95 etc.... in such a case you should exit the trade instead of waiting for price to fall to your $90 stop price.

However, if after you bought the stock at $100 its price immediately began to increase like +$101, +$102, +$103 etc..... then after a while it begins to fall, there is hope that it will still go up since it had already shown early signs of rising. In such a case you should not exit early.

So, it is not bad to exit a trade before you stop is hit, you can take a small loss, recheck your strategy to see what went wrong, then enter the trade again.

It is not bad as long as you re-enter the market when the condition is favorable. Many times we could make an error in judgement and enter a trade wrongly, and when this happens you see the result immediately as the trade starts producing loss instead of profit. When you realize this, there's no point of being a robot and waiting for your stop loss to be hit, simply exit the trade early and re-enter at the right time.

It depends on the circumstances. A trade should immediately slide into profit the moment it is opened, if not you should close it immediately.

There is the "7% Rule" used by stock traders where they sell off a stock if its price falls below 7% of the price it was bought. You can apply that same rule to forex trading.

I would only do it if i wanted to switch bias. For instance, if i were short and i wanted to change bias to long, then i would close the short trade and open a long one.