Core performance metrics
- Expectancy
- The average amount you can expect to win or lose per trade, calculated as (win % × average win) − (loss % × average loss). A positive expectancy means a strategy pays you over a large enough sample, even though any single trade can still lose. Read the full breakdown →
- R-Multiple
- A trade's profit or loss expressed as a multiple of the dollar amount initially risked (1R). A trade that risked $200 and made $600 is a “+3R” trade — R-multiples let you compare trades of very different sizes on the same scale.
- Win Rate
- The percentage of trades that closed profitably. On its own, win rate doesn't determine profitability — a low win rate with large winners and small losers can be very profitable, and a high win rate with tiny winners and rare large losses can be a losing system. Read the full breakdown →
- Profit Factor
- Gross profit divided by gross loss across a set of trades. A profit factor above 1 means total wins outweigh total losses; like win rate, it needs a reasonable sample size before it's trustworthy.
- Maximum Adverse Excursion (MAE)
- The worst unrealized loss a trade reached before it was closed, regardless of how it eventually finished. Comparing MAE across winning trades shows whether stops are placed too tight relative to the normal “heat” a winner takes on the way to profit.
- Maximum Favorable Excursion (MFE)
- The best unrealized profit a trade reached before it was closed. Comparing MFE to a trade's actual exit shows how much profit was routinely left on the table — or appropriately protected — by an exit rule.
- System Quality Number (SQN)
- A single score combining a strategy's average expectancy with the consistency of its trade results and the number of trades taken, intended to say more about a system's reliability than expectancy alone.
Risk & position sizing
- Max Drawdown
- The largest peak-to-trough decline in account equity over a period. Central to prop-firm-style risk management, since funded accounts are typically evaluated against a maximum drawdown limit, not just overall profitability.
- Cash Flow Ledger
- A record of deposits and withdrawals on a trading account, kept separate from trading P&L. Without one, an account's balance and equity curve silently drift from reality the moment it's topped up incrementally or a prop firm pays out — a ledger reconciles the two without changing win rate, expectancy, or drawdown %, which stay pure trading-skill measures. Read the full breakdown →
- Kelly Criterion
- A formula for the position size that maximizes long-run compounded growth, given a strategy's win rate and win/loss ratio. Full Kelly sizing is usually too aggressive for real trading, which is why most traders who use it size at a fraction (e.g. half-Kelly).
- Risk of Ruin
- The probability that a given strategy, at a given position size, eventually strings together enough losses to wipe out — or unacceptably damage — an account, based on its win rate, win/loss ratio, and risk per trade.
- Consistency Rule
- A rule used by many funded/prop trading firms requiring that no single day (or week) account for more than a set percentage of a trader's total profit during an evaluation or payout period — meant to filter out one lucky outlier day from otherwise unproven performance.
Statistical rigor
- Sortino Ratio
- A variant of the Sharpe ratio that only penalizes downside volatility — losing trades or periods — rather than all volatility. Often considered more intuitive for traders, since an upside swing usually isn't experienced as “risk.”
- Wilson Score Interval
- A statistically robust way to estimate a confidence interval around a proportion — like a win rate — computed from a limited number of trades. More reliable at small sample sizes and extreme percentages than the naive margin-of-error calculation most traders reach for. Read the full breakdown →
- Multiple Comparisons Problem
- The statistical risk of testing many hypotheses at once — such as reviewing performance across dozens of trade tags. The more categories you slice your results by, the more likely one of them shows an extreme result purely by chance, not because it's a real pattern. Read the full breakdown →
Mechanics & process
- Trading-Day Rollover
- The boundary used to group trades into a single “trading day.” For futures, that's the exchange's session boundary (17:00 CT for CME products) rather than calendar midnight, since futures trade nearly around the clock — bucketing by midnight instead produces wrong daily P&L, streaks, and calendar views. Read the full breakdown →
- FIFO Trade Matching
- Reconstructing closed trades from a list of individual fills by matching each exit against the earliest still-open entry, first-in-first-out. The standard, most defensible way to turn a raw fill-by-fill execution history into discrete trades when a position was built or closed across multiple fills. Read the full breakdown →
- Plan vs. Actual
- A structured journaling practice of recording a trade's plan (entry, stop, target, thesis) before or at entry, then comparing it against what actually happened at exit — used to separate “the plan didn't work” from “I didn't follow the plan,” which call for very different fixes.
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