What is Win Rate?

The percentage of trades that close in profit — meaningless on its own, decisive when paired with risk:reward.

Win rate is the percentage of your trades that close in profit: 40 winners out of 100 trades is a 40% win rate. It is the statistic beginners obsess over and professionals treat as only half of an equation, because a win rate says nothing without the size of the wins and losses attached to it. A trader winning 90% of the time can still go broke if the rare losses are ten times larger than the frequent wins — a pattern common among traders who cut winners early and let losers run.

The honest question is always win rate combined with risk:reward. At 1:3 risk:reward, a 30% win rate is profitable; at 1:1, you need better than 50% just to cover costs. This is also why chasing a high win rate is a trap: the adjustments that raise it — wider stops, closer targets — usually destroy the reward side of the equation. Judge any strategy, or any signal provider, on both numbers together across a real sample of published wins and losses.