Trading Expectancy Calculator

Expectancy is the average amount you make or lose per trade over many trades. This Trading Expectancy Calculator turns your win rate, average win and average loss into expectancy per trade in money and in R, the breakeven win rate for your payoff, and what that adds up to across a month of trades.

Defaults to a GBP account. Everything is computed in your browser from your own inputs. It describes the numbers you typed, it does not forecast your results.

Enter as a positive number. This is treated as 1R.

How to use it

  1. Win rate, the share of closed trades that finished positive.
  2. Average winning trade, the mean profit on your winners in account currency.
  3. Average losing trade, the mean loss on your losers, entered as a positive number. The calculator treats this as one R.
  4. Trades per month, optional. Multiplies the per trade figure to show a monthly expectation.

The formula is expectancy = (win rate × average win) - ((1 - win rate) × average loss). Dividing by the average loss gives expectancy in R. The breakeven win rate is 1 ÷ (1 + payoff ratio) where payoff ratio is average win divided by average loss.

Use figures from a large sample. Twenty trades tell you very little. Two hundred start to mean something.

FAQ

What is trading expectancy?

It is the average result per trade if you repeated your current statistics many times. A positive expectancy means the approach made money on average over the sample. A negative one means it lost.

What is expectancy in R?

R is your average loss treated as one unit of risk. Expectancy of 0.35R means that, on average, each trade returned 35% of a typical loss. It lets you compare systems with different position sizes.

What is the breakeven win rate?

It is the win rate at which expectancy is exactly zero for your payoff ratio. With winners twice the size of losers you break even at 33.3%. With winners the same size as losers you break even at 50%, before costs.

Does positive expectancy mean I will be profitable?

No. It describes a past sample. Future trades can differ, spreads and commissions eat into the figure, and a small sample can look far better or worse than the long run. Treat the number as a description, not a promise.

Is anything sent to a server?

No. The calculation runs in your browser. The share link only encodes the numbers you typed.

See also the free trading tools hub, the risk reward calculator and the Kelly criterion calculator. Please read our risk disclosure.

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Paste into any page. The calculator renders in place with a credit link back here.

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