Quick Answer
The metrics that matter most are win rate, profit factor, expectancy, risk-to-reward ratio, and average win vs. average loss — together, not in isolation. Win rate alone can be misleading (a high win rate with small wins and rare large losses can still be unprofitable), while profit factor and expectancy give a more reliable picture of whether a strategy is actually making money over a large enough sample of trades.
Logging trades is only half of journaling — the other half is knowing which numbers to actually look at. A handful of metrics, tracked consistently, tell you far more about your trading than scrolling through individual trades ever will. This article covers the metrics worth tracking and, just as importantly, what each one can and can't tell you on its own.
Win Rate
Win rate is the percentage of trades that closed profitably. It's the most intuitive metric and the easiest to misread in isolation: a 70% win rate sounds great, but if your average loss is three times the size of your average win, that strategy can still lose money overall. Win rate is a useful starting point, never the full story.
Profit Factor
Profit factor is gross profit divided by gross loss. A profit factor above 1 means the strategy is net profitable over the sample; below 1 means it's losing money regardless of how good the win rate looks. A profit factor of 1.5, for example, means you made $1.50 for every $1.00 lost. It's a better single-number snapshot of a strategy's health than win rate alone, because it accounts for the size of wins and losses, not just how often they happen.
Expectancy
Expectancy is the average amount you can expect to win or lose per trade, combining win rate with average win and average loss size. A positive expectancy means that, on average, each trade you take adds to your account over a large enough sample — even if any individual trade could go either way. It's the metric that answers "is this strategy worth continuing to trade?" most directly.
Risk-to-Reward Ratio
Risk-to-reward compares how much you stood to lose against how much you stood to gain on a given trade — a 1:2 ratio means the potential reward was twice the risk. Tracking the risk-to-reward you actually achieve (not just what you planned) shows whether you're taking profit too early, letting losses run past your stop, or systematically choosing trades with poor risk-to-reward setups.
Average Win and Average Loss
These two numbers, side by side, quickly reveal whether your winners are actually big enough to justify your losers. A strategy with a mediocre win rate can still be strongly profitable if average wins meaningfully outsize average losses — and a strategy with a high win rate can quietly bleed money if the reverse is true.
Largest Win and Largest Loss
Your biggest single win and biggest single loss are worth watching separately from the averages. A profit-factor number that looks healthy can sometimes be propped up by one outsized win — worth knowing, since it changes how confident you should be in the underlying edge. A single outsized loss is also worth investigating on its own: was it a planned trade that went wrong, or a stop loss that wasn't respected?
Performance by Strategy, Instrument, and Session
Every metric above is more useful once it's broken down by strategy tag, instrument, or session rather than lumped into one overall number. A trader whose overall win rate is a mediocre 45% might discover that one specific setup is winning 65% of the time, while a second setup they keep repeating is dragging the average down — information the aggregate number alone would never reveal.
Where these numbers come from
Wrytics calculates win rate, profit factor, expectancy, and risk-to-reward automatically from your logged and MT5-synced trades, alongside average win, average loss, and largest win/loss — visible on the statistics dashboard without any manual spreadsheet formulas, and Pro accounts can go further with AI Trading Reports that surface which strategies or sessions are driving the numbers.
How Often to Check These Metrics
Checking these numbers after every single trade tends to produce overreaction to small samples. Reviewing them weekly or monthly, across enough trades to be meaningful, gives a much steadier read on whether a strategy is genuinely working or just running through a normal streak of variance.
A Quick Checklist
- Track win rate, but never read it alone
- Check profit factor to see if the strategy is net profitable
- Use expectancy to judge whether a strategy is worth continuing
- Compare average win vs. average loss, not just how often you win
- Break every metric down by strategy, instrument, and session
Key Takeaways
- Win rate, profit factor, expectancy, and risk-to-reward each answer a different question — none is complete alone.
- Profit factor and expectancy are generally more reliable indicators of real profitability than win rate.
- Most of these metrics only become meaningful after 30–50 trades in a given strategy.
- Wrytics calculates these metrics automatically from manually logged or MT5-synced trades.