Win rate is the fraction of trades that closed at a profit, expressed as a percent. A 60% win rate means 6 out of every 10 trades made money. It is the most cited and most misleading single statistic about a trading system.
Win rate in isolation says nothing about whether a strategy is profitable. A 90% win-rate strategy with average winner 0.5R and average loser 5R has negative expectancy. Combine win rate with average win, average loss, and trade frequency to assess real edge — that combined metric is expectancy.
Different strategies cluster at different win rates: mean-reversion at 60–80% with small RR, trend-following at 30–50% with high RR. Comparing win rates across styles is meaningless.
Formula
win_rate = winning_trades / total_trades
Example
Out of 100 trades, 55 were winners. Win rate = 55%. Profitability depends on the size of those winners vs. the size of the 45 losers.
How Noon Barbari uses Win rate
Every concept here is implemented in the platform. Open the relevant docs or tool to see it in action.
How we report backtests →Related terms
- Statistics
Expectancy
Average profit (or loss) per trade — the most honest measure of edge.
- Statistics
Profit factor
Gross profit divided by gross loss. > 1.0 = profitable, > 1.5 = strong.
- Risk
Risk-reward ratio
Ratio of potential gain to potential loss on a trade — also written R-multiple.
- Statistics
Median
Middle value of a sorted series — robust to outliers, unlike the mean.