Win rate answers one question: out of the trades you closed, how many were winners? It is the first number every trading journal shows and the one most often misread, because a win rate says nothing about how much the winners made or the losers cost.
Formula
win rate = winning trades / (winning trades + losing trades)
Trades that closed within a small band around zero are breakeven trades and stay out of both the top and the bottom of the fraction. Counting a trade that made $2 after commission as a win inflates the number without adding any money.
Example
You closed 22 trades last month: 11 winners, 9 losers and 2 trades that ended within $10 of zero.
With the two breakeven trades counted as wins it would read 59%, a better number for the same month.
How to read it
A win rate is only half of a pair. The other half is the payoff ratio, the size of the average win against the average loss. A 35% win rate with winners three times the size of the losers makes money; a 70% win rate with losers twice the size of the winners loses it. Read win rate next to expectancy or profit factor, never alone.
Trend followers often live between 30% and 45%; scalpers and mean-reversion traders often sit above 55%. Neither is better. What matters is whether your win rate stays where your own history says it should.
In SetupBook
Win rate is the second card on the dashboard and in Analytics, with "BE excluded" written under it. The breakeven band is set per account in dollars or as a percentage of the starting balance. With fewer than five trades in the period the card shows an n= badge, because four trades cannot carry a percentage.
Common mistakes
- Counting tiny positive exits as wins.
- Comparing win rates across strategies with very different targets.
- Reading a win rate from fewer than 30 trades. See sample size.