Definition
Understand how often your trades finish in profit.
Formula. Winning closed trades ÷ all closed trades × 100. Break-even trades stay in the denominator. Open trades are excluded.
Two accounts, same win rate, opposite outcomes
| Account | Win rate | Average win | Average loss | Net over 100 trades |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A | 60% | $100 | $200 | −$2,000 |
| B | 60% | $200 | $100 | +$8,000 |
| C | 35% | $400 | $120 | +$6,200 |
How it goes wrong
- Ignoring break-even trades
- Orderblock keeps break-even trades in the denominator and counts them separately. A tool that drops them inflates win rate by an amount that varies with your style.
- Including open positions
- Win rate is computed from closed trades only. Counting a favourable open position as a win is how a losing month looks like a winning one.
- Optimising for it
- Win rate is the easiest metric to improve and the easiest to improve destructively: hold losers longer and take profits earlier and it rises while expectancy falls.
Questions
What is a good win rate?
There is no good win rate independent of payoff. A 35% win rate with a 3:1 reward-to-risk ratio is strongly profitable; an 80% win rate with a 1:5 ratio is not. Judge the pair, never the percentage.
Does a high win rate mean low risk?
Often the opposite. High win rates frequently come from strategies that let losses run, which concentrates risk into rare, large drawdowns that a win-rate figure cannot show.