This is arithmetic on the numbers you type: general information, not financial advice, and not a prediction. An expectancy is an average of trades that already happened, so it describes the past and only holds while your trading, your strategy and the market stay as they were. Real results arrive in streaks, not averages. See the risk disclaimer.
Expectancy is the number that decides whether a strategy makes money. Win rate on its own cannot, which is why a 40% win rate can beat a 70% one.
E = (win% × average win) − (loss% × average loss)
Win 40% of the time, +2R on winners and −1R on losers: (0.40 × 2) − (0.60 × 1) = +0.20R per trade. Positive means the edge is in your favour on these numbers.
Break-even win rate = 1 ÷ (1 + reward-to-risk)
At 2R winners against 1R losers, 33.3% is break-even. Everything above that is edge; a 70% win rate on 0.3R winners against 1R losers is not.
Thirty trades tell you very little: one outlier moves the average win enough to flip the sign. Expectancy becomes trustworthy the way any average does — slowly, and only if you keep the inputs honest.
Win rate, average win and average loss are easy to estimate and easy to get wrong. Remembered numbers flatter you: the winners are vivid, the scratch trades are forgotten, and the one catastrophic loss gets filed as an exception. A journal that records every closed trade is where honest inputs come from.
Any positive number is an edge on the trades you measured; how large a number is worth chasing depends on how many trades you take and what they cost you in fees and attention. We do not publish a target, because a number that looks good over 30 trades routinely disappears over 300.
R, if you can. Expressing wins and losses as multiples of the risk you took makes the result comparable across instruments and account sizes, and it stops a period of larger position sizes from looking like an improvement in skill. Currency is fine when every trade risked a similar amount.
More than most traders would like. Averages are unstable in small samples, and a single outlier can flip the sign of your expectancy. Treat an early number as a rough indication, watch whether it holds as the sample grows, and be sceptical of any figure quoted without the count behind it.
No. It describes the average of trades that already happened. The future only matches it if your strategy, your execution and the market stay as they were, and results arrive in streaks either way — a positive expectancy is entirely compatible with a long losing run.
Profit factor is gross profit divided by gross loss: 1.0 is break-even, and it is the same information as expectancy from another angle. Expectancy tells you what one trade is worth; profit factor tells you how many dollars you earn per dollar lost. Both move together.
No. The page does the arithmetic in your browser. Nothing is sent to a server, nothing is saved, and closing the tab discards it.
TradingSocial computes your win rate, average win and average loss from every closed trade you log, in R, and states the sample size next to them. Free for 14 days of Pro — a card starts the trial, and cancelling before it ends costs nothing.
