Glossary
What Is an R-Multiple in Trading
1R is the amount you lose if the stop is hit. A trade's result in R is the profit or loss divided by that risk — so trades on any account size compare fairly.
How it works
R is a trade's result expressed not in dollars but as a fraction of the amount you risked. If you set a stop worth $100 and the trade closed with a $250 profit, the result is +2.5R. That notation works the same on a $500 account and a $50,000 account, so it lets you compare trades of very different sizes on equal footing.
Calculating R is simple: divide the trade's dollar result by the risk you took before entry — the distance between entry and stop, multiplied by position size. A losing trade that hits its stop with no slippage produces exactly −1R. Every other outcome, from worse than −1R (with slippage) to any positive number, lands on that same scale.
R matters because it moves the conversation about trades away from raw feelings — "I made a lot" or "I only lost a little" — and onto a consistent scale. A series of trades measured in R shows whether a strategy works on average, instead of letting one oversized trade dominate a month's statistics.
Example
Risk on the trade is $100 (entry-to-stop distance × position size). The trade closes with a $320 profit. Result: 320 / 100 = +3.2R. Another trade with the same $100 risk closes at the stop: result −1R, meaning −$100.
Common mistake
A common mistake is calculating R against the current account balance instead of the specific trade's risk. That makes the same dollar profit produce a different R on different trades, and the numbers stop being comparable.
Read next
Related terms
Frequently asked questions
- Can R be worse than −1?
- Yes — if slippage or a gap fills the stop at a worse price, the loss exceeds the planned risk and R can come out at, say, −1.4.
- How is R different from a percentage return?
- A percentage is measured against account balance and shifts as the balance changes, while R is always tied to that specific trade's risk — so trades from different periods stay directly comparable.
Plan versus outcome — for every trade
The Trading OS journal keeps the planned RR and the actual R of each trade side by side and computes expectancy from real results.
No sign-up — the journal runs in your browser; an account is only needed for sync.