Win rate is the percentage of your total trades that close as winners. If you took 100 trades and 55 of them were profitable, your win rate is 55%. It's the single most-quoted trading statistic — and also the most misleading one when read on its own.
The Win Rate Formula
Win Rate = (Number of Winning Trades ÷ Total Number of Trades) × 100
Take every trade in the period you're measuring — a week, a month, your full history — and divide the count of winners by the total count of trades, including breakeven and losing ones. Multiply by 100 to get a percentage.
A Worked Example
Say you took 40 trades this month. 22 closed in profit, 18 closed at a loss. Your win rate is 22 ÷ 40 = 0.55, or 55%. That number by itself tells you nothing about whether you made or lost money — it only tells you how often you were right.
Why a High Win Rate Doesn't Mean a Profitable Strategy
A trader who wins 80% of the time but risks $300 to make $50 on each trade can still lose money overall — four small wins get wiped out by a single loss. Meanwhile, a trader who wins only 35% of the time but risks $100 to make $400 can be highly profitable, because each win covers several losses with room to spare.
Win rate measures how often you're right. It says nothing about how much you make when you're right versus how much you lose when you're wrong — that's what risk-reward ratio and expectancy measure instead. A full breakdown of why win rate alone isn't a reliable performance measure is covered in why win rate alone is not enough.
Is There a "Good" Win Rate?
There's no universal target. A scalping strategy with a tight risk-reward ratio might need a 65%+ win rate to be profitable. A trend-following strategy that lets winners run might be highly profitable at a 35% win rate. The right question isn't "is my win rate high enough" — it's "is my win rate high enough relative to my risk-reward ratio" to produce a positive expectancy.
How to Track Your Win Rate Accurately
Win rate is only useful if it's calculated from a complete, honest trade history — not a mental tally that conveniently forgets a few losses. Manually logging every trade in a spreadsheet works until you skip an entry after a rough session, which is exactly when the data matters most.
Your Win Rate, Calculated Automatically
LedgerPips syncs automatically with your MT4/MT5 account, so your win rate — and every other statistic that matters — is calculated from a complete trade history, not a manually maintained log with gaps.
Conclusion
Win rate is easy to calculate and easy to misread. Use it alongside risk-reward ratio and expectancy, not by itself — a strategy's real profitability depends on all three together, not any single number.
