Free trading expectancy calculator

Work out your expectancy per trade, profit factor and payoff ratio from your win rate and average win and loss. No sign-up.

Enter your win rate and your average win and average loss. Use the same units for both, such as dollars or R multiples. The tool gives your expectancy per trade, profit factor and payoff ratio.

The formulas

• Expectancy = win rate x average win - loss rate x average loss
• Profit factor = (win rate x average win) / (loss rate x average loss)
• Payoff ratio = average win / average loss

A positive expectancy means that, over many trades, each trade is worth that amount on average. A profit factor above 1 means gross profit exceeds gross loss. See win rate, profit factor and expectancy explained for a worked example.

Use your real numbers

The inputs only mean something if they come from real trades. A journal that logs every trade gives you an honest win rate and average win and loss; the free template calculates them, and AI Trading Journal does it automatically from MT5. A small number of trades gives unreliable results, so be cautious below about 30 to 50 trades.

This calculator is for education. It is not trading or investment advice.

A worked example in R multiples (hypothetical)

Using R (the amount you risk on a trade) instead of dollars makes results comparable across account sizes. Suppose a setup wins 40% of the time, the average winner is 2R and the average loser is 1R. Expectancy = 0.40 x 2 - 0.60 x 1 = 0.20R per trade. Profit factor = (0.40 x 2) / (0.60 x 1) = 1.33. Payoff ratio = 2 / 1 = 2.0. If you risk $100 per trade, that is about $20 per trade on average, or $2,000 over 100 trades before costs, with a lot of variation along the way.

How win rate and payoff combine

The grid shows expectancy per trade in R for a range of hypothetical win rates and payoff ratios (average win divided by average loss), before spread and commission:

A 30% win rate is profitable only with a payoff of 3 or better in this grid, while a 60% win rate with a payoff of 1.0 earns 0.20R per trade. The negative cells are the important ones: they show combinations that lose money however disciplined you are.

How many trades before you can trust the numbers?

A measured win rate is only an estimate. As a rough rule, the 95% margin of error on a win rate near 50% is 1.96 x the square root of (0.5 x 0.5 / trades):

With 30 trades, a measured 50% win rate could easily be a true 35% or a true 65%. With 300 trades the range tightens to roughly 44% to 56%. That is why the calculator warns against reading much into small samples, and why a journal that records every trade is worth more than one that records the memorable ones.

Break the numbers down by setup

One blended expectancy hides which parts of your trading work. If your journal tags each trade with a setup, session and instrument, you can calculate expectancy for each group. A common finding is that one setup carries the account and another quietly loses money. Each group needs its own reasonable sample, so start with the two or three groups where you have the most trades.

• By setup: breakout, pullback, range fade and so on, as you define them.
• By session: Asian, London, New York, or the hour of the day.
• By instrument: a pair or gold may behave very differently under the same rules.
• By plan adherence: compare trades where you followed your rules with trades where you did not. The gap is the cost of indiscipline in your own numbers.

What the result does not tell you

• Costs. Spread, commission and swap come out of every trade. Use net results in the inputs, not gross.
• Variation. A positive expectancy can still produce long losing streaks; check the losing streak calculator and the drawdown recovery calculator.
• Changing conditions. Expectancy measured in a trending market may not hold in a range. Review it by period.
• Future results. It describes your past trades. It is not a promise about the next one.

To combine this with position sizing, see the position size calculator, and for the full set of numbers a journal should produce, read trading performance analysis.

A short checklist before you trust the result

• Did you use net results, after commission and swap, for every trade in the sample?
• Are there at least 50 trades in the group you are measuring, and ideally more?
• Did you include every trade, including the ones you would rather forget, and any you closed early by hand?
• Is the average loss measured on trades that were actually stopped out, not on the stop you intended?
• Does the result hold in both halves of the sample? Split your trades into an earlier and a later half and compare. A big difference means conditions or behaviour changed.

Expectancy starts from a win rate. The win rate calculator shows how wide the margin is for your sample size.

Frequently asked questions

Related guides

• Free position size calculator (forex and gold)
• Free risk to reward calculator
• Free drawdown recovery calculator
• Free forex and gold profit and loss calculator
• Free margin calculator for forex and gold
• Free trading compounding calculator
• Free losing streak calculator
• Prop firm drawdown calculator (daily and maximum loss)
• Prop firm risk calculator: how many losing trades until the limit
• Risk of ruin calculator for traders
• All trading journal comparisons