Losing streak (maximum consecutive losses)
A losing streak is an uninterrupted run of losing trades; the maximum losing streak is the longest such run in a record. Even with independent trades and a stable win rate, long streaks are common: at a 50% win rate, a run of six or more losses appears in about 55% of 100-trade samples.
Senzoukria · Glossary · Updated September 2026
At a glance
- Chance of one given run of k losses
- qᵏ, q = loss rate
- Longest run in n trades
- Grows roughly like log(n) ÷ log(1/q)
- Assumption behind the table
- Independent trades, constant win rate
- In Senzoukria
- Longest losing streak in the Replay report; Streak card in the journal dashboard
How long streaks get by chance
The probability that one specific sequence of k trades is all losses is qᵏ, which looks small: 1.6% for six losses at a 50% win rate. But a record of 100 trades contains about 95 starting points for such a run, and the question that matters is whether at least one of them occurs. The exact probabilities below were computed for independent trades with a constant win rate.
| Win rate | Chance of a streak ≥ 6 | Chance of a streak ≥ 8 | Typical longest streak |
|---|---|---|---|
| 60% | 21% | 3.6% | about 4.6 |
| 50% | 55% | 17% | about 6.0 |
| 40% | 87% | 49% | about 7.9 |
Why real streaks are often longer
Trades taken in the same session share the same regime, the same news and the same trader. When outcomes are positively correlated, losses cluster and streaks lengthen beyond what the independent model predicts. The table is therefore a floor for planning, not a ceiling.
The practical use is sizing. At a fixed risk of 1% of equity per trade, eight consecutive losses remove 1 − 0.99⁸ ≈ 7.7% of the account. If a daily loss limit or a prop firm drawdown allowance is smaller than the streak you should expect, the size, not the strategy, is the first problem.
In Senzoukria
The session report opened by End in Replay shows Longest losing streak and Longest winning streak; the Performance panel lists Winning streak and Losing streak in its Risk section. Trades that close at exactly zero neither break nor start a streak. The journal dashboard's Streak card shows the current run of wins or losses with the best and worst runs underneath, skipping breakeven trades. To see how streaks could have fallen differently, the Gauntlet reshuffles the order of the backtest trades 10,000 times and reports the median, 5th-percentile and 1st-percentile maximum drawdowns, and the prop firm Monte Carlo on accounts reshuffles sessions in blocks precisely so that losing streaks survive the shuffle.
Related
In the same section
- Low volume node
- Lookahead bias
- Maintenance margin
- Long/short ratio
- Maker and taker
- Local cache
- Index-to-futures mapping
- Listing cycle
This page in other languages
Frequently asked questions
- My strategy just lost seven times in a row. Is it broken?
- Not necessarily. At a 40% win rate, a streak of seven or more appears in most samples of 100 trades. A streak is evidence of a change only when it is unusual for the win rate you measured, and when other signs, such as a falling average trade, point the same way.
- How do I use streak statistics to size positions?
- Take a streak length you would expect to see, for instance the typical longest streak for your win rate plus a margin for clustering, multiply it by the risk per trade, and check that the result fits inside your daily loss limit and drawdown allowance with room to spare.