Trade Expectancy Calculator
Trade Expectancy Calculator
Your win rate alone doesn't tell you if a strategy works. This does. Updates live — no signup, nothing saved.
Enter your win rate, average win, and average loss to see your expectancy.
What is trade expectancy — and why win rate alone is misleading
Expectancy is the average amount a strategy makes or loses per trade, over many trades. It combines two numbers traders usually look at separately — how often you win, and how much you win or lose when you do — into one honest scorecard.
This matters because win rate by itself tells you almost nothing. A strategy can win 80% of the time and still lose money if the average loss dwarfs the average win — one bad trade erases weeks of small gains. The reverse is also true: a 40% win-rate strategy can be very profitable when winners are much larger than losers. Neither fact is visible until you run the expectancy math.
Believing a strategy is working because it feels like it's winning, without checking the actual expectancy, is a common way overconfidence shows up in trading. The feeling of being right and the math of making money are different things — expectancy is where you find out which one you have.
How to use this calculator
- Pull your last 30–50 trades from your trading journal or your broker's trade history — the more trades, the more meaningful the numbers.
- Enter your win rate: the percentage of those trades that closed profitable.
- Enter your average win and average loss in dollars — or switch to R-multiples if you track risk in R (1R = your planned risk per trade).
- Optionally add how many trades you take per month to project an expected monthly result.
- Read the expectancy. Positive means the math is on your side; negative means no amount of discipline will save the strategy — the setup itself needs to change.
Don't have these numbers yet? The Decision Journal tracks your win rate and average win/loss automatically over time, so expectancy stops being a guess.
Frequently asked questions
What is trade expectancy?
Expectancy is the average amount a strategy makes or loses per trade, over many trades. It's calculated as (win rate × average win) − (loss rate × average loss). A positive expectancy means the strategy makes money on average; a negative one means it loses, no matter how any single trade feels. It's the single most honest scorecard a trading strategy can have.
Is a higher win rate always better?
No. A strategy that wins 80% of the time can still lose money if the average loss is many times larger than the average win — one bad trade wipes out weeks of small wins. Conversely, a strategy that wins only 40% of the time can be very profitable if winners are much larger than losers. Win rate and risk-reward only mean something together, which is exactly what expectancy captures.
What's a good expectancy value?
Any expectancy above zero is technically profitable before costs — but you want a comfortable margin above zero after commissions, fees, and slippage. As a rough guide, if your expectancy per trade is less than two or three times your round-trip costs, the strategy is fragile: a small change in win rate or average loss can push it negative. Bigger and more consistent is better; the number's sign matters more than its size.
What's the difference between expectancy and risk-reward ratio?
Risk-reward ratio describes a single trade setup — how much you stand to make versus lose on this one trade. Expectancy describes a whole strategy over time, combining the ratio with how often you actually win. A 1:3 risk-reward trade taken with a 10% win rate has negative expectancy; the same ratio at a 40% win rate is strongly profitable. Use the risk-reward calculator to size up individual setups, and this calculator to judge the strategy those setups add up to.
Related tools
Expectancy tells you if the math works. The Bias Checker tells you if your reasoning does.
Paste the reasoning behind your next trade and see which cognitive biases are quietly shaping it — instant, free, nothing saved.