Win rate calculator for trading

What win rate measures, and what it misses

Win rate is the share of your trades that closed in profit. It is the first number most traders look at and the easiest to misread, because it counts outcomes without weighing them. A trader who wins nine trades of £10 and loses one of £100 has a 90% win rate and a losing record.

The missing piece is the payoff: how big your winners are compared with your losers. Put the two together and you get expectancy, the average amount each trade adds to or takes from the account. Expectancy is what decides whether a strategy grows an account over many trades. Win rate is only one of its two ingredients.

This is why the calculator asks for the average win and the average loss as well as the counts, and why the second half of the result is about the payoff rather than the win rate itself.

The formulas

With W winning trades, L losing trades, an average win A and an average loss B (as a positive number):

Win rate = W ÷ (W + L)

Expectancy per trade = win rate × A − (1 − win rate) × B

Profit factor = (W × A) ÷ (L × B)

Break-even win rate = B ÷ (A + B) = 1 ÷ (1 + A/B)

Expectancy can be shown in money or in R, where 1R is the average loss. An expectancy of +0.35R means every trade adds, on average, 35% of what a typical loss costs. Working in R lets you compare a record across account sizes, and it is what you get if you choose "R" in the calculator and enter your averages as multiples of risk (for example an average win of 1.8 and an average loss of 1).

The likely range under the result is a 95% Wilson interval. It answers a simple question: given this many trades, how far could the true long-run win rate sit from the one you measured? On 20 trades the range is wide. On 300 it narrows to a few points either side.

A worked example

A hypothetical journal of 100 trades, which is the calculator's default: 45 wins averaging $200 and 55 losses averaging $100.

1. Win rate: 45 ÷ 100 = 45.0%.
2. Payoff ratio: $200 ÷ $100 = 2.00.
3. Expectancy: 0.45 × $200 − 0.55 × $100 = $90 − $55 = $35 a trade, or +0.35R.
4. Profit factor: (45 × $200) ÷ (55 × $100) = $9,000 ÷ $5,500 = 1.64.
5. Break-even win rate: 1 ÷ (1 + 2) = 33.3%, so this record wins 11.7 points more often than it needs to.

The net result over the 100 trades is +$3,500. The likely range for the true win rate comes out at 36% to 55%: even at the bottom of that range the record stays above break-even at this payoff, which is a reassuring sign. If the same journal had only 20 trades with the same proportions, the range would be far wider and the conclusion much weaker.

Reading the break-even table

The table under the result lists the break-even win rate for reward-to-risk ratios from 1:0.5 to 1:3 and shows how far your own win rate sits above or below each. It answers a practical question: if you changed your exits, how much win rate could you afford to lose?

Moving a target further away usually raises the payoff and lowers the win rate at the same time. If your win rate is 45% and you move from 1:1.5 to 1:2.5 targets, the break-even falls from 40% to 28.6%, but only a backtest or a journal tells you whether your win rate would stay above it. The risk reward calculator works out the ratio for a single planned trade.

Getting the inputs from your journal or platform

You need four numbers, and most trading platforms already have them. In MetaTrader's account history report, or the statistics page of most journals, look for the count of profit trades and loss trades and the average profit trade and average loss trade. Enter the loss as a positive number; the calculator ignores the sign either way.

If your risk per trade has changed over time, money averages mix trades of different sizes and blur the picture. In that case record each result in R (the result divided by the amount you risked on that trade) and choose R in the calculator. An average win of 1.6R and an average loss of 0.9R, for example, tells you both how your exits behave and how often trades end short of the full stop.

Use one strategy at a time. A journal that mixes a breakout method with a range method averages two very different records into one that describes neither. Tag trades by setup, as covered in the lesson on tagging trades by setup type, and run the calculator for each tag separately.

Common mistakes

Counting break-even trades as wins. Trades closed at entry are neither. Leave them out of both counts, or the win rate looks better than the record is.

Ignoring costs. If your averages are taken from closed trade results in your platform, spread and commission are already inside them. If you worked them out from chart distances, they are not, and the real expectancy is lower.

Judging too early. Twenty trades is not enough to tell a 45% strategy from a 60% one. Keep going, and use the range in the result to see how sure you can be. Our lessons on what to record in every trade and win rate versus risk-reward cover how to build a record worth measuring.

Forgetting the path. A positive expectancy can still produce long losing streaks. At a 45% win rate, a run of eight losses in a row is an ordinary event over a few hundred trades. The risk of ruin calculator shows what those streaks do at different risk levels.

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