Win rate

Your win rate is the percentage of closed trades that ended as winners. Close 100 trades, book 55 of them green, and your win rate is 55%. It's the first metric most traders quote and the most misread — a number that feels like a scorecard but tells you almost nothing about whether you're actually making money.

How it's calculated

Count your winners, divide by the total number of closed trades, multiply by 100. Open trades don't count — only positions you've actually exited.

The arithmetic is trivial; the definitions are where it gets slippery. What counts as a "winner"? A trade that closes at exactly your entry is a scratch — is it a win, a loss, or excluded entirely? Most platforms drop breakeven trades from the denominator, but some fold them into losses, and the two conventions can move your headline number by several points.

Fees make it worse. A trade that's up two ticks gross but net negative after commission and spread is a loss on your P&L and a win on a gross-price chart. Decide once whether you measure win rate on gross or net outcomes, then stay consistent — otherwise you're comparing this month's net figure against last month's gross and calling the drift "improvement." Net is the honest choice, because net is what hits your account.

Why it matters

Win rate matters, but only as one input. On its own it's silent about profitability, because it says nothing about the size of your winners versus your losers. A 70% win rate where every winner is 0.5R and every loser is 2R is a losing strategy — you're right most of the time and bleeding anyway. A 35% win rate at 3R is a machine.

That's the seductive trap: high win rate feels like skill, so traders optimize for it. They cut winners early to lock in the green tick and let losers run hoping to avoid the red one. The hit rate climbs, the account shrinks. You've traded your edge for the feeling of being right.

To know whether a win rate is any good, pair it with two things. First, your average win / average loss — the ratio that tells you what each side is actually worth. Second, your breakeven win rate — the minimum hit rate that keeps expectancy at zero for your reward-to-risk profile. If your live win rate sits below that threshold, you're losing money no matter how respectable 48% sounds. If it clears the threshold comfortably, you have real edge. The single number that ties both sides together is trading expectancy: average profit per trade, win rate and payoff baked in. Model yours in the trading expectancy calculator and watch how a "great" win rate collapses under a poor payoff ratio.

Related concepts

Win rate is only half of any performance conversation — the other half is how much you make when you're right versus how much you give back when you're wrong. Start with your average win / average loss to size both sides, then check your figure against your breakeven win rate to see whether it clears the bar your strategy needs. Roll everything into trading expectancy for the number that actually predicts your equity curve, and use profit factor as a quick gross-dollars-won-per-dollar-lost gut check.

Track it against real fills rather than memory. Tradeways dashboards plot your win rate next to average R and expectancy, so you can see at a glance whether a high hit rate is earning its keep or quietly hiding a payoff problem.