Why the number everyone quotes says almost nothing on its own — and what to look at instead. This lesson covers: Win rate alone is meaningless, The trap, Thinking in R, Name it, The win rate you actually need, Work it out, The tradeoff nobody escapes, Reading a claim, What to track instead, Put it together.
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Win rate is the metric most often quoted in trading marketing precisely because it can be true and meaningless at the same time. It is straightforward to produce a high win rate by taking small profits and holding losses.
The relationship between reward-to-risk and required win rate is fixed arithmetic, not opinion: at 1:1 you need above 50%, at 1:2 above 33%, at 1:3 above 25%. Any claim can be checked against it.
There is no target. It falls out of your reward-to-risk. A 30% win rate at 1:3 is profitable; a 60% win rate at 1:0.5 is not.
Only alongside the reward-to-risk and sample size. On its own it describes frequency and says nothing about profit.
A result expressed as a multiple of the amount risked. Risking 1% and making 2% is +2R, regardless of account size — which makes trades comparable.