Reading your own stats

Your journal produces numbers. This lesson is how to read them — because the metric most beginners obsess over is the one that lies the most, and the one that actually matters barely gets mentioned.

Win rate is a vanity metric

“I win 70% of my trades” sounds great and tells you almost nothing. A 90% win rate still blows up if the occasional loss is enormous. A 40% win rate can be a goldmine if the winners dwarf the losers. Win rate only means something paired with how big your wins and losses are.

Expectancy is the truth

The one number that actually says “do I have an edge” is expectancy — your average profit per trade, in R, across the whole sample. Positive expectancy means that, repeated enough, you make money. Negative means you bleed, no matter how good any single trade felt. Play with the two inputs:

Notice it: just 40% winners is profitable when your average win is 2R — because the math, not the hit rate, decides. That’s why pros happily lose more often than they win, as long as their R is big enough.

The metrics that matter

Beyond expectancy, watch your average R (are winners really bigger than losers?), your max drawdown (the deepest hole — can you stomach it?), and your sample size. And give it room: thirty-plus trades before you judge anything. Ten trades is noise; a season of trades is signal.