“What is your win rate?” is the most popular question in trading and one of the least informative. A method that wins 80% of the time and loses four times what it makes is a slow bankruptcy. A method that wins 35% of the time with runners that pay 4R is a business. The number that decides which one you own is expectancy: the average result of a single trade, expressed in units of your own risk.
This calculator computes it, tells you the win rate you would need just to break even at your reward-to-risk, and — the part most calculators skip — subtracts the cost of trading, which is the reason so many systems that look positive on paper are negative in an account.
The formula, in the open
Expectancy in R is: (win rate × reward-to-risk) − (loss rate × 1) − cost. At a 45% win rate with 2R winners and 0.05R of cost, that is (0.45 × 2) − 0.55 − 0.05 = +0.30R per trade. If your risk unit is $250, the system is worth about $75 per trade taken — on average, over a large number of trades, and never on any particular one.
The breakeven win rate is the same equation solved for zero: (1 + cost) ÷ (R + 1). At 2R you need 35% to stay level after costs. At 1R you need 52.5% — and that extra 2.5 points over a coin flip is precisely what kills most symmetric systems, because it has to be earned against the market every single trade.
What the cost field really represents
Set it honestly. It is not just the commission. It is commission plus exchange and clearing fees plus the half-tick you routinely give up entering plus the slippage on stop-outs, which fill worse than limit orders by construction. The tighter the stop, the larger the fraction. On a 6-tick E-mini stop — $75 of risk — a round-turn commission alone is already about 0.05R and a single tick of slippage on the stop-out adds another 0.17R, so 0.1–0.3R is realistic there. Wide-stop swing systems live nearer 0.02–0.05R. Notice what happens when you type 0.15 into that field with a 1:1 system: the breakeven win rate climbs above 57%, and a strategy that felt like a coin flip with an edge turns out to have been paying a tax it could never cover.
Why expectancy per trade feels so unimpressive
+0.30R is a genuinely good system, and it looks like almost nothing next to a single trade's outcome. That gap is the psychological trap of this business: the edge lives at the level of hundreds of trades, while attention lives at the level of the current one. A trader who compares each result to the expectancy will conclude the system is broken roughly half the time, because in any short window randomness dominates the edge completely. The compounded column above exists to show the other end of the telescope — the same unimpressive number, applied a hundred times.
What to take from this
- Win rate is meaningless alone. It only becomes information when paired with reward-to-risk — and the pair only becomes truth after costs.
- Costs are not a rounding error. At small stop distances, friction can be a third of your entire edge. Trading more often multiplies it.
- Raising R lowers the win rate you need — but you must be able to hold the trade. A 4R target you exit at 1.2R out of discomfort is a 1.2R system with a 4R spreadsheet.
- Negative expectancy is not fixed by volume, leverage or conviction. It is fixed by changing the trades you take or how you exit them. Nothing else touches it.
Not financial advice. Everything on this page is educational — history, simulations, and reasoning, not recommendations. It is not a signal service and not investment advice. Trading futures and options carries a substantial risk of loss. Never risk money you cannot afford to lose.
Want the full method, not just the ideas?
Three free preview lessons — structure, order flow, options — in the real teaching style. No email wall. Watch them and decide if this way of thinking is for you.
Watch the free previews