Glossary
What Is Win Rate and How Do You Calculate It
The share of winning trades among closed ones. On its own it says nothing about profit: read it together with the average R of wins and losses.
How it works
Win rate is the percentage of profitable trades among all trades closed over a period. It's calculated simply: the number of winning trades divided by the total number of closed trades, times 100. For this calculation, a trade only needs to be counted as winning or losing based on the sign of its result, not its size.
The key thing about win rate is that it says nothing about how big the wins and losses actually were. A system with a 35% win rate can be steadily profitable if the rare wins are much bigger than the frequent small losses, while a 70% win rate system can bleed the account if a couple of large losses outweigh many small wins.
That's why win rate is always read together with profit factor and average R per trade. On its own, win rate is mainly useful for comparing the same setup against itself across different periods — as a signal that market behavior or a trader's discipline has shifted.
Example
40 trades close over a month, 14 profitable and 26 losing. Win rate = 14 / 40 × 100 = 35%. If the average win is noticeably larger than the average loss, the system can still be net profitable at that win rate.
Common mistake
A common mistake is chasing a higher win rate by cutting profits short too early. That can push the win percentage up while dragging down the overall dollar result.
Read next
Related terms
Frequently asked questions
- What's a normal win rate?
- There's no fixed norm — profitable systems exist at 30% and at 65%; it all depends on the ratio between average win and average loss.
- Can you raise win rate without losing profitability?
- Sometimes — if the issue was random early entries rather than exiting winners too soon. You can only confirm this by looking at stats for a specific setup.
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.