Winning rate (Course #1)
The goal of this page is that you understand winning rate and how it works.
Your win rate is how many trades are winning trades out of all the trades. This is fairly easy and straightforward.
Did you know that you don’t need to win 100% of the time?
As a matter of a fact, I found that algos with a VERY HIGH win rate (98-99%) are the worse ones, because the 1-2 % of losing trades represent a loss that is usually equal or bigger than all the gains altogether.
See below one of my very first profitable algo. I never got that major loss with this algo, but I knew it would come. I got lucky because I stopped the algo right before a big move against me, which would have caused a liquidation event (similar to what happened to me with the PSAR bot from Swing Trade Pros, see the introduction post).
This is basically 769 trades with no loss whatsoever. June July Mid August 2021. This is great right? Yes, but I never slept well because I knew my strategy had a flaw and I could get liquidated at anytime. This algo is one of the algo I run side by side with my hands free algo. I just turn it off when I know that I am at risk of being liquidated. Or, I turn it on when I am rather confident of the direction of the market overall.
So what is the point of having a 99% win rate if the 1% loss can erase the 99% profits?
In reality you will find that most traders or strategies varies between 25% and 45% win rate. You might think how come you can be profitable if you win only 25% of the time? Hang on I will prove it to you below.
My best strategy has a 45% win rate approximately. I have great strategies with 25% win rate also. Most manual traders (no algo) are at about 30 to 35% win rate. Some of these guys on Twitter (very rare) have over 50% win rates, same as Market Cipher Crypto Face, he’s got a higher than 50% win rate I think. He is a very good trader, and this is why he’s very wealthy, because he knows how to manually trade. This benchmark should give you a good idea of what to expect.
Another thing – the higher the time frame you use, the higher your win rate. For example, Bitcoin has a tendency to go up only – at least on the macro level, let’s say on the daily time frame. So right there you have what we call an edge, this is an advantage over the market. The advantage is a higher probability to go up than to go down. Because of that, you can easily develop an EMA crossover strategy that will win more than 50% of the time! EASY!
Now if you trade on the 5 min timeframe, you literally have a 50% chance for the price to go in either direction. You can try to play the trends here and there, check the momentum, whatever, but if you have traded Bitcoin for long enough, you should know as much as me that ANYTHING can happen at ANYTIME – and even if you were over the 200 EMA, even if Market Cipher showed a bullish divergence and even if you were at a major horizontal support, ANYONE can dump the market (e.g. a whale – or Elon tweeting) and go against all the odds. Because anything can happen, it is much harder to have a really high win rate.
So how can you make money if you win only 30% of the time?
Check out the example : out of 10 trades, only 3 of them are in profit (3/10 = 30%)
Does the order of the trades change the final profit?
I shuffled the order of the trades – we can see that it doesn’t matter whether you have a losing strike or more losses before the wins, the results at the end is totally the same.
So YES you can make money and lose the majority of the time. It doesn’t take anyone a Master’s degree to understand that this is due to the relative size of the wins to the losses. This also introduces the concept of R multiple, which I cover in Tutorial 5.
Take a look below at the 10% win rate strategy.
Personally I would love to have this strategy with a 10% win rate! Imagine this is 1 day worth of trades, you end up making 2.314% ! If you do this everyday, you can almost double your money in 1 month! This is true! This is also because of compounding, which I will cover in Tutorial 2.
On this example, you can see the winner in relation to the losses, is much larger. 12% win is 12 times bigger than the average loss.
What if I don’t compound at each trade? Well in this case, you would get 3% return overall.
Before I jump into the conclusion, I want to talk about my 99% win rate strategy. Now that we have covered some examples, thing about a strategy that has a 1% win rate? QFL Luc is a great trader and in one of his videos, he talks about this guy who basically has a trading system with almost a 1% win rate. The thing is, each losses is super small. But 1 time out of 100, he gets right at a bottom or a top, and the trade goes in his favor, and he makes a huge gain, which covers for all his losses! Cool right!
Conclusion:
Most algos and manual traders have win rates in the 30-40% range.
The profitability is the result of the size of my winners as compared to the size of my losers.
“Keep your losses small and let your winners run”.
Your win rate is how many trades are winning trades out of all the trades. This is fairly easy and straightforward.
Did you know that you don’t need to win 100% of the time?
As a matter of a fact, I found that algos with a VERY HIGH win rate (98-99%) are the worse ones, because the 1-2 % of losing trades represent a loss that is usually equal or bigger than all the gains altogether.
See below one of my very first profitable algo. I never got that major loss with this algo, but I knew it would come. I got lucky because I stopped the algo right before a big move against me, which would have caused a liquidation event (similar to what happened to me with the PSAR bot from Swing Trade Pros, see the introduction post).
This is basically 769 trades with no loss whatsoever. June July Mid August 2021. This is great right? Yes, but I never slept well because I knew my strategy had a flaw and I could get liquidated at anytime. This algo is one of the algo I run side by side with my hands free algo. I just turn it off when I know that I am at risk of being liquidated. Or, I turn it on when I am rather confident of the direction of the market overall.
So what is the point of having a 99% win rate if the 1% loss can erase the 99% profits?
In reality you will find that most traders or strategies varies between 25% and 45% win rate. You might think how come you can be profitable if you win only 25% of the time? Hang on I will prove it to you below.
My best strategy has a 45% win rate approximately. I have great strategies with 25% win rate also. Most manual traders (no algo) are at about 30 to 35% win rate. Some of these guys on Twitter (very rare) have over 50% win rates, same as Market Cipher Crypto Face, he’s got a higher than 50% win rate I think. He is a very good trader, and this is why he’s very wealthy, because he knows how to manually trade. This benchmark should give you a good idea of what to expect.
Another thing – the higher the time frame you use, the higher your win rate. For example, Bitcoin has a tendency to go up only – at least on the macro level, let’s say on the daily time frame. So right there you have what we call an edge, this is an advantage over the market. The advantage is a higher probability to go up than to go down. Because of that, you can easily develop an EMA crossover strategy that will win more than 50% of the time! EASY!
Now if you trade on the 5 min timeframe, you literally have a 50% chance for the price to go in either direction. You can try to play the trends here and there, check the momentum, whatever, but if you have traded Bitcoin for long enough, you should know as much as me that ANYTHING can happen at ANYTIME – and even if you were over the 200 EMA, even if Market Cipher showed a bullish divergence and even if you were at a major horizontal support, ANYONE can dump the market (e.g. a whale – or Elon tweeting) and go against all the odds. Because anything can happen, it is much harder to have a really high win rate.
So how can you make money if you win only 30% of the time?
Check out the example : out of 10 trades, only 3 of them are in profit (3/10 = 30%)
Does the order of the trades change the final profit?
I shuffled the order of the trades – we can see that it doesn’t matter whether you have a losing strike or more losses before the wins, the results at the end is totally the same.
So YES you can make money and lose the majority of the time. It doesn’t take anyone a Master’s degree to understand that this is due to the relative size of the wins to the losses. This also introduces the concept of R multiple, which I cover in Tutorial 5.
Take a look below at the 10% win rate strategy.
Personally I would love to have this strategy with a 10% win rate! Imagine this is 1 day worth of trades, you end up making 2.314% ! If you do this everyday, you can almost double your money in 1 month! This is true! This is also because of compounding, which I will cover in Tutorial 2.
On this example, you can see the winner in relation to the losses, is much larger. 12% win is 12 times bigger than the average loss.
What if I don’t compound at each trade? Well in this case, you would get 3% return overall.
Before I jump into the conclusion, I want to talk about my 99% win rate strategy. Now that we have covered some examples, thing about a strategy that has a 1% win rate? QFL Luc is a great trader and in one of his videos, he talks about this guy who basically has a trading system with almost a 1% win rate. The thing is, each losses is super small. But 1 time out of 100, he gets right at a bottom or a top, and the trade goes in his favor, and he makes a huge gain, which covers for all his losses! Cool right!
Conclusion:
Most algos and manual traders have win rates in the 30-40% range.
The profitability is the result of the size of my winners as compared to the size of my losers.
“Keep your losses small and let your winners run”.
Related publications
Disclaimer
The information and publications are not meant to be, and do not constitute, financial, investment, trading, or other types of advice or recommendations supplied or endorsed by TradingView. Read more in the Terms of Use.