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Win rate

Also called: Strike rate · Percent profitable · Hit rate

Win rate — The share of your closed trades that finished in profit.

Win rate is the most quoted and least informative number in trading. It is trivially easy to raise and tells you nothing at all without the figure that sits beside it.

In plain English

Count the trades that closed in profit, divide by the total, express as a percentage. That is the whole calculation. TapeSheet counts a trade as a win on its net result, after commission and swap — a trade that made $3 gross and paid $5 in commission is a loss, because it lost you money.

Any win rate can be manufactured. Take profit at two pips and you will win 90% of the time; hold losers indefinitely and you will win almost every trade you ever close. Both of those destroy accounts. This is not a hypothetical failure mode, it is the single most common one.

The number only becomes meaningful once you pair it with the average win / average loss ratio. Together they produce expectancy, which is the number you actually wanted.

The formula

Worked example — the demo account

The demo account: 49 winners and 47 losers out of 96.

A 51.04% win rate against a break-even requirement of 39.7% — an 11.3-point cushion.

That cushion is what the account is actually living on, and it is a better description of the edge than either number alone. Lose your payoff advantage — cut winners a little earlier, let losers run a little further — and the break-even requirement climbs. At a payoff of 1.0, this account would need to win 50% of the time, and it wins 51.04%. Almost nothing would be left.

Also worth separating: the demo account wins 51.04% of its trades but 58.8% of its days (31 green days out of 51). Day win rate and trade win rate are different questions and the answers routinely disagree.

Every figure above is from the demo account TapeSheet ships with — 96 closed trades, generated from a fixed seed. Open the same account →

What this does not tell you

The caveat is the part worth reading. Most tools put it in a footer, if they print it at all.

• Nothing about whether you make money. A 90% win rate with an average loss nine times the average win is a losing system. A 35% win rate with 4:1 winners is a very good one. Win rate on its own is not evidence of anything.
• Nothing about the size of anything. It weighs a $3 win exactly like a $3,000 win.
• Nothing about sample size. Six wins from ten trades is 60% and means nothing at all. TapeSheet prints the raw counts next to the percentage so this is hard to forget.
• It can be gamed without lying. Widening a stop converts a loss into an open position, and an open position is not in the closed-trade statistics. A rising win rate alongside a falling account balance is the classic signature, and it is visible on the equity curve long before it is visible here.

Where TapeSheet shows it

The Win rate tile on the Overview with the raw counts underneath, a separate Day win rate tile, and per-symbol, per-session and per-weekday win rates in the breakdown tables. Win rate contributes 10% of the Tape Score — deliberately the smallest weight of the five trading inputs.

Related terms

• Average win / average loss ratio — Your average winning trade divided by your average losing trade — how much bigger a typical win is than a typical loss.
• Expectancy — The average amount you win or lose per trade, across every trade — the arithmetic mean of your results.
• Profit factor — Gross profit divided by gross loss — how many currency units you made for every one you lost.
• R-multiple — A trade result expressed as a multiple of the money you planned to risk on it — a +2R trade made twice what you were prepared to lose.

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