From fills, not memory
Recorded at the moment of execution. Nothing to remember to log, and nothing quietly omitted after a bad session.
Per strategy, per accountFree tool
Your win rate is not the number that matters.
A 70% win rate loses money if the losses are large enough, and a 35% win rate compounds if the winners are big enough. Expectancy is the figure that settles it — what one average trade is worth — and this works it out alongside the win rate you needed to break even.
Win rate and expectancy calculator
Count of winning and losing trades, and the average size of each in whatever currency you trade. Averages are enough — you do not need the individual trades.
The default figures are a 35% win rate that makes money. That is the point of the tool: the pairing of win rate and reward-to-risk decides the outcome, and neither number tells you anything on its own.
Expectancy per trade —
Win rate —
Reward to risk —
Break-even win rate —
Profit factor —
Net over these trades —
What each number means
Four outputs, and only the first one is a verdict.
- Expectancy
- What one average trade is worth. Positive means the process makes money over enough trades; negative means more trades makes it worse, not better. This is the only output that decides anything.
- Break-even win rate
- The win rate at which expectancy is exactly zero, for your reward-to-risk. If you are winning less than this, the strategy loses. It is why a 3:1 strategy can win a quarter of the time and still work.
- Reward to risk
- Average win divided by average loss. Raising it lowers the win rate you need, which is usually an easier problem than winning more often.
- Profit factor
- Gross winnings divided by gross losses. Above 1.0 is profitable. It says nothing about the path — a profit factor of 1.4 can contain a drawdown that ends the account before the average arrives.
The arithmetic
Standard, and worth being able to check:
win rate = wins ÷ (wins + losses)
expectancy = (win rate × avg win) − (loss rate × avg loss)
reward:risk = avg win ÷ avg loss
break-even rate = 1 ÷ (1 + reward:risk)
profit factor = (wins × avg win) ÷ (losses × avg loss)What this cannot tell you
Expectancy is an average, and an average has no order. Two strategies with identical expectancy can have completely different survivability, because one of them delivers its losses consecutively.
Sequence is missing. Ten losses in a row at 1% is a 10% drawdown even if the hundredth trade makes it all back. A positive expectancy that requires you to sit through a 40% drawdown is a strategy you will abandon at the worst possible moment.
Sample size is missing. Thirty trades is not evidence. A 60% win rate over thirty trades is entirely consistent with a 45% win rate and some luck. This is why Quanify withholds Sortino below three losing months and Sharpe below twelve — a ratio computed from a thin sample is a number, not a measurement.
Costs may be missing. If your averages are before commission and slippage, expectancy is overstated by roughly the round-trip cost per trade. On a strategy averaging $30 a trade, $4 of costs is thirteen percent of the edge.
Getting the inputs without typing them
Every figure this tool asks for is one you should not be estimating from memory, and if your fills are recorded you do not have to.
Quanify's journal is built from broker executions rather than typed entries — it records every fill as it happens, tagged by strategy, account and session, because the platform placed the order. Win rate, expectancy, average win and loss, profit factor and maximum drawdown come out of that automatically, per strategy.
Which also means the losing trades are in there. A journal you write yourself is a journal with survivorship bias built into it.
Costs included
Paper accounts apply the commission and slippage you set, per side, so expectancy is measured after costs rather than before them.
Per-side commissionWithheld when thin
Ratios that need a sample stay hidden until there is one. A confident number the data cannot support is a way of being precisely wrong.
12 months for SharpeCommon questions
How do you calculate win rate?
Divide the number of winning trades by the total number of trades. Thirty-five wins out of a hundred trades is a 35% win rate. On its own it tells you nothing about whether the strategy makes money.
What is expectancy in trading?
What one average trade is worth: (win rate × average win) − (loss rate × average loss). Positive expectancy means the process makes money over enough trades. Negative means taking more trades makes the outcome worse rather than better.
What is a good win rate for a trader?
There is no good win rate independent of reward-to-risk. At 3:1 you break even winning 25% of the time; at 0.5:1 you need 67% just to stand still. The pairing decides it, which is why this tool shows the break-even rate alongside your actual one.
What is profit factor?
Gross winnings divided by gross losses. Above 1.0 is profitable. It says nothing about the order those results arrived in, so a respectable profit factor can still contain a drawdown large enough to end the account.
Can I have a low win rate and still be profitable?
Yes, and many trend strategies are exactly that. Winning 35% of the time with an average win nearly three times the average loss produces positive expectancy. The trade-off is psychological: most losing trades feels like failure even when the arithmetic is working.
Is my data sent anywhere?
No. The calculator runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you type is transmitted, stored or logged, and the page makes no network request while you use it.
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Start on a simulated account.
Connect a sim or evaluation account and run the whole product against it before you point anything at live money. Nothing about the setup changes when you do.