Win Rate Calculator

How wins and losses become a rate

Someone typing a win loss ratio calculator and someone typing a win ratio calculator are usually after the same two fields this page opens with, and it is worth saying what each phrase usually means, because the two meanings are not the same number. A count ratio divides winners by losers — 18 / 12 = 1.50. A payoff ratio divides the average winner by the average loser — 300.00 / 200.00 = 1.50. On the example below those two happen to land on the same figure by coincidence, and that coincidence is unusual; most journals report a count ratio and a payoff ratio that disagree, and the break-even rate is decided by the second one, not the first.

1. The rate is a share of trades, not a share of money. Eighteen wins out of thirty is 60% whether those wins were 10.00 each or 3,000.00 each. Money enters only through the payoff ratio in the next line.
2. The count ratio and the payoff ratio answer different questions. The first says how often you are right; the second says how much being right pays relative to being wrong. A method can be wrong more often than it is right and still make money, which is why the two are printed side by side above rather than merged.
3. The break-even rate is the rate at which expectancy is zero. Below it, more trades lose money faster. Above it, more trades make money — slowly, if the headroom is thin.
4. The standard error is the honest part. A rate measured over a handful of trades is an estimate with a width, and the width is bigger than most people expect. It is printed above for the exact sample you typed.

The last line of the formula is the one this page adds that a journal export usually does not: the rate is not a fact about your method, it is a measurement of it, and measurements carry error bars.

Worked example: 18 wins, 12 losses, 300.00 and 200.00

Every figure below is typed into the fields above, and every step can be checked with a phone calculator. Nothing is fetched from anywhere.

1. Trades counted: 18 + 12 = 30.
2. Win rate: 18 ÷ 30 = 60.00%.
3. Loss rate: 12 ÷ 30 = 40.00%, which is also 100% − 60%.
4. Count ratio: 18 ÷ 12 = 1.50 winners for every loser.
5. Payoff ratio: 300.00 ÷ 200.00 = 1.50.
6. Break-even rate: 200.00 ÷ (300.00 + 200.00) = 200.00 ÷ 500.00 = 40.00%. The short form gives the same thing: 1 ÷ (1 + 1.50) = 1 ÷ 2.50 = 40.00%.
7. Check that break-even really is break-even: at 40.00% over 30 trades you would have 12 wins and 18 losses. 12 × 300.00 = 3,600.00 won, 18 × 200.00 = 3,600.00 lost, and the difference is 0.00. That is the check worth doing by hand — if it does not come out at zero, the rate you computed is not this method's break-even.
8. What actually happened: 18 × 300.00 = 5,400.00 won, 12 × 200.00 = 2,400.00 lost, net 3,000.00.
9. Per trade: 3,000.00 ÷ 30 = 100.00.
10. Headroom: 60.00% − 40.00% = 20.00 percentage points between the rate you measured and the rate that pays nothing.

Step 7 is the one to keep. Twenty percentage points of headroom sounds comfortable until it is set against step 9: 100.00 per trade on a sample of thirty is a total of 3,000.00, and a run of seven losers — which arrives in 72.1% of thirty-trade stretches at this rate — takes back 1,400.00 of it.

Twenty losers deep: what 2% a trade compounds to

A win rate says how often losers arrive. It does not say what they cost, because cost depends on how much was risked on each one. The table below is the site's own losing-streak data at 2% of the account risked per trade, printed in full — twenty rows, no sampling, no rounding applied on top of what the file publishes. The last two columns are arithmetic on those published figures: the drawdown is the shortfall from 100%, and the gain needed to recover is the shortfall divided by what is left.

The third and fourth columns are where the asymmetry lives and it is worth staring at for a moment. Ten losers in a row at 2% costs 18.29% of the account, but getting back to even needs 22.38% — a gap of 4.09 percentage points that appeared from nowhere except the smaller base. By twenty losers the gap is wider than the drawdown: 33.24% lost, 49.79% needed. Nothing about the method changed between those two rows; only the base the recovery is computed on did.

How likely is a run that long, at your rate

The two halves meet here: the win rate decides how often a run of a given depth turns up, and the table above decides what that run costs. Joining them is a single question — over a fixed number of trades ahead, how likely is at least one stretch of k losers in a row? At a 60% win rate each trade has a 40% chance of being a loser, so five specific trades in a row lose with probability 0.40⁵ = 0.01024. That is the chance for one particular window; over a hundred trades there are many overlapping windows, and the chance that at least one of them produces five in a row is far higher.

Read the 60% column against the equity table and the shape of the problem appears. Three losers in a row is a certainty — 98.8% — and costs 5.88% of the account. Five in a row is close to a coin flip at 45.9% and costs 9.61%, needing 10.63% to earn back. Beyond that the probabilities collapse faster than most people assume, which is the good news, and the depths that do arrive are survivable at 2% risk — which is the point of risking 2% rather than 10%.

The 30% column is the cautionary one. A method that wins less than a third of the time sees five in a row essentially always, and fifteen in a row in one stretch of a hundred out of eight. Whether that is survivable depends entirely on the column it is risking, not on the rate.

The rate you measured and the rate you own

Sixty percent from thirty trades and sixty percent from a thousand trades are two different statements, and only the second one is a description of a method. The standard error of a win rate is the square root of (rate × loss rate ÷ number of trades); at 60% over 30 trades that is the square root of 0.24 ÷ 30 = 0.0894, or 8.94 percentage points. Two standard errors either side gives the usual 95% band.

Set against the 40.00% break-even of the worked example, the first two rows are uncomfortable: a 30-trade sample cannot tell the difference between a method that makes 100.00 a trade and one that makes nothing. Halving the width costs four times the trades, and going from thirty to a thousand — 6.0 points wide rather than 35.0 — is the difference between a number to act on and a number to keep collecting. This is also why raising the risk percentage on the strength of a short hot streak is a bet on noise.

Break-even rates across payoff ratios

The rate you need is decided by the payoff, not by the count ratio and not by conviction. Divide one by one plus the payoff ratio and the answer is the win rate that pays nothing at all.

A payoff below 1 — where the average winner is smaller than the average loser — demands better than a coin flip just to stand still, and 0.50 demands two trades in three. This is the row people skip: cutting winners short while letting losers run does not show up in the win rate at all, and it moves the line the win rate is measured against.

This page and its neighbours, side by side

Four pages on this site touch the win rate, and they split it at the input and output line.

• This page produces the rate. It takes counts of wins and losses out of a journal and returns the rate, the two ratios, the break-even and the width of the measurement.
• The kelly criterion calculator consumes it. It asks what fraction of the balance a known win rate and payoff justify, and it takes the rate as something you already have. If you do not have one yet, this is the page that gives you one.
• The risk reward calculator runs the same break-even line in the other direction. It starts from a ratio you plan to take and reports the win rate that ratio demands, before any trades exist. Here the ratio comes out of trades that already happened.
• The risk of ruin calculator asks how deep the hole gets. It takes the rate and the risk per trade and returns the probability of reaching a drawdown you name, using the same streak table this page prints a column of.

None of these four decide how large a position should be. That is the position size calculator on the home page, and it needs a stop distance rather than a win rate.

Questions traders ask

How do I calculate my win rate?

Divide the number of winning trades by the total number of trades that had a result, and leave the scratch trades out of both sides. On the example above: 18 ÷ (18 + 12) = 18 ÷ 30 = 60.00%. The break-even rate is a separate division using money rather than counts — 200.00 ÷ (300.00 + 200.00) = 40.00% — and the gap between the two, 20.00 percentage points, is what the method is actually earning from.

What is a good win rate in trading?

There is no number that works without the payoff beside it. A 40% win rate with a payoff of 1.50 breaks even exactly — 1 ÷ (1 + 1.50) = 40.00% — and a 90% win rate with a payoff of 0.10 loses money on almost every winner. Compare your measured rate against your own break-even rate, both printed by the tool above, rather than against a figure quoted from someone else's method.

What is the difference between win/loss ratio and win rate?

The win rate is winners as a share of all trades — 18/30 = 60.00%. The win/loss ratio is winners divided by losers — 18/12 = 1.50 — and it is a ratio, not a percentage. Confusing the two is common because "win loss ratio" also gets used for the payoff ratio, which is average win divided by average loss. The tool above prints all three separately so that none of them has to be guessed from a label.

How many trades do I need before my win rate means anything?

Enough that the interval around it is narrower than your headroom. At a measured 60% the 95% band is 35.0 percentage points wide over 30 trades, 19.2 wide over 100 and 6.0 wide over 1000. If your headroom above break-even is 20.00 points, a 30-trade sample cannot rule out that you are break-even, because 42.5% — the bottom of that band — is only 2.5 points above it.

How many losses in a row should I expect?

More than feels fair, and the count depends on the rate rather than on skill. At 60% the chance of three in a row somewhere in the next hundred trades is 98.8%, and five in a row is 45.9%. Those are not warnings that something has broken — they are what a 40% loss rate looks like when it is sampled a hundred times. What matters is the cost: five straight losers at 2% per trade leave 90.39% of the account, needing 10.63% to get back.

My win rate went up after twenty trades. Should I risk more?

Check the width first. Twenty trades at a measured 60% gives a standard error of 10.95 percentage points and a 95% band from 38.5% to 81.5% — wide enough to contain a method that loses money. Raising the risk percentage multiplies whatever the true rate is, including the ones at the bottom of that band, and the losing-streak table above shows a ten-deep run costs 18.29% at 2% and a great deal more at 5%.

Does the calculator work with total trades and a win rate instead of counts?

Yes. Switch the first field to "Total trades and win rate" and the counts are derived from what you type; the derived counts may be fractional if the rate does not divide evenly, and that is shown rather than silently rounded. Everything downstream — ratios, break-even, net result, standard error and the run table — is computed the same way in either mode.

What a count of wins cannot tell you

The rate is a description of trades that are finished, and it is a worse guide to the next one than it looks. Four things sit outside it on purpose.

• Whether the conditions are still the same. A rate measured across a trending quarter says nothing about a month that chops. The sample is treated here as if every trade were drawn from one method, and that assumption is yours to make, not the page's.
• The size of the winners you did not take. Exiting early raises the win rate and lowers the payoff, and the break-even line moves the other way at the same time. A rate that climbs while the payoff falls is usually this, and neither figure alone shows it.
• Order. Two journals with the same 18 wins and 12 losses can deliver very different drawdowns depending on where the losers landed, and the run table above gives probabilities rather than a sequence for that reason.
• Costs. Commission and financing sit inside the average win and average loss if you recorded them net, and outside them if you did not. Whichever you chose, the break-even rate is only as honest as those two averages.

Every figure on this page runs in your browser from the counts and averages you type, plus one published column of the site's own streak data. That file, with the same numbers, is published as an open reference dataset.

Size the next trade from your risk

Related guides

• Kelly criterion calculator — what fraction of the balance a measured win rate and payoff justify, full Kelly against half Kelly.
• Risk reward calculator — the win rate a planned ratio demands, before any trades exist.
• Risk of ruin calculator — the chance your account reaches a drawdown you pick, at 0.5%, 1% or 2% per trade.
• How much should you risk per trade? — where the 2% column in the streak table comes from and how the percentage was chosen.
• Drawdown calculator — the fall from peak and the larger gain the reduced balance needs to climb back.
• Open reference dataset — the four CSV files behind every table on this page.