Win rate

Win rate is the share of closed trades that ended with a positive net result, usually expressed as a percentage of all trades. On its own it says nothing about profitability, because it ignores how large the winners and losers were.

Senzoukria · Glossary · Updated September 2026

Counting winners

Win rate = winners ÷ total trades. What counts as a winner depends on the accounting: a trade that made ticks but lost money after commissions is a winner gross and a loser net. Scratches, trades closed at exactly zero, are usually excluded from the numerator and either included in or removed from the denominator; the convention should be stated.

Split by direction, the long win rate and the short win rate often diverge, which is a first check that a strategy does not depend on the trend of the sample.

Why it is not enough

  • Profitability depends on win rate and the win/loss ratio together: expectancy = win rate × average win − loss rate × average loss.
  • A strategy that takes small profits and lets losses run can show a high win rate and a negative expectancy.
  • A breakout strategy can have a low win rate and a positive expectancy if its winners are several times its losers.
  • The win rate of a short sample is a coarse number: with twenty trades, one trade moves it by five percentage points.

In Senzoukria

The Replay performance panel shows Win rate, the counts of winners, losers and scratches, and separate Long win rate and Short win rate lines in its Direction section, while the Success section holds the win rate itself. The desktop Welcome screen displays Win rate with Profit factor and Max drawdown as a summary of the recorded trading. The site's journal page lists win rate first among the statistics it computes from imported trades, with the note that they are computed, not claimed.

The backtest panel does not use win rate as an optimisation objective; it reports it with the trade list and relies on expectancy, SQN or Sharpe per trade for selection.

Common mistakes

  • Selecting a strategy for its win rate and discovering that its losers are large.
  • Quoting a gross win rate on an instrument where commissions turn many small winners into losers.
  • Comparing win rates across strategies with different stop and target distances.
  • Treating a change in win rate over a few sessions as a regime change rather than sampling noise.

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Frequently asked questions

What is a good win rate?
There is no answer without the win/loss ratio. A win rate is good if, combined with the average win and average loss, it produces a positive expectancy after costs with a drawdown the account can survive. Strategies with very different win rates can be equally sound; the number only describes how often a trade closed positive.
How are scratches handled in the win rate?
A scratch is a trade whose net result is zero. The Replay performance panel counts winners, losers and scratches separately so the reader can see how many trades fell in neither group. Whether scratches sit in the denominator is a convention; what matters is applying the same rule when comparing two records.

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