Mar 09 2025 6 mins 6
What’s More Important: Win Rate or Risk-Reward?
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#580: What’s More Important: Win Rate or Risk-Reward?
In this video:
00:23 – What should your win rate be?
01:03 – Controlling your emotions.
01:23 – An example of a 90% winning system trader.
03:01 – A high reward:risk is more important.
04:47 – Summary of what’s important to be a profitable trader.
05:24 – 17 minutes Masterclass and Book a Call.
05:47 – Blueberry Markets as a Forex Broker.
06:03 – Comments, Like & Subscribe.
What percentage win rate do you need to be a successful and profitable trader? Let’s get into that and more right now.
Hey there, Trades! Andrew Mitchem here at The Forex Trading Coach. Video on podcast number 580.
What should your win rate be?
Want talk all about a winning percentage level rate. What should it be? and what do you need that to be in order to be a profitable trader. Now the answer is quite interesting. And it may not be quite what you’re expecting me to say.
You see, if I ask most people out there, what should your percentage win rate paid? They’ll go, oh, it needs to be 80%, 90% in order to be profitable. Then it’s not actually true. There’s more to it than just the win rate. Yes, sure. The win rate is very important. And yes, it’s more than just how many winning trades you get.
Controlling your emotions.
It’s the whole mental approach to trading. There’s two things in trading you need to control. Like I’ve said, one’s ahead, one’s your heart. You’ve got to control your emotions. And so obviously having more winning trades, more profitable trades is a good thing psychologically, emotionally it helps you trading. Of course it does gives you confidence. Everybody wants to see winning trades.
An example of a 90% winning system trader.
But here’s a scenario, I had someone many years ago, and you may have heard me talk about this in the past, who came to me with and this was a real situation, by the way, came to me with a 90% winning system. So every ten trades, they had nine profitable trades, one loss. You’d think, especially if you’re relatively new to trading.
Wow, what an amazing system. I want to know how they did it. The issue is, is that person was losing money. And you think about it. How does that happen? Well, it’s quite simple. What they were doing is having small wins and a big loss. And to put it in very simple, basic terms, let’s, let’s talk pips.
You know, I don’t like pips. And I don’t believe in pips as a way of identifying profit. But let’s make it simple. And let’s say that they had nine trades in a row making an average of ten pips profit. So therefore they made 90 pips. You could think of it as like percentages. And they had one loss out of those ten trades that lost let’s say 100 pips.
So now the minus ten pips. If they were making 1% all the time and they lost 10%. Yeah. Same thing. You know, they’re negative, but the win rate’s really good, which is what you all want. And I’m here to say, well, maybe it’s not quite as important as you think. So for me, there’s more important factors.
A high reward:risk is more important.
And a good strategy to me should always have a high reward to risk. And that’s more important. And let’s do some very quick numbers again. Let’s imagine we still have ten trades. And let’s imagine instead of being a 90% winning system we’re only a 50%. So we’re losing half the trades. We take one and every two trades we take will now lose. Okay. In this scenario. Now let’s say we have a 3 to 1 reward to risk trade.
So that means on every single trader take I have a stop loss. Let’s call it 1%. And I have a profit targets. Let’s say it’s three times. Now of course in reality it’s not always going to be exactly that. But let’s for example, assume like some basic numbers. So three times my risk is my reward. So I have five trades five trades lose 1% each 5% loss five trades win 3 to 1.
They make 3% each 15%. So I’ve lost 5%, made 15%. Obviously it becomes a net gain. Positive 10%. But I’ve lost 50% of my trades. And you go well how can you lose half your trades and still be profitable? Well, I’ve shown you. So you take that scenario further and you can see like at 40%, 30%. And you know, you work out the numbers and the mathematical and, you know, numbers there and the stats, and you realize that you don’t have to have a 90% win rate.
It’s more important to have the quality trades and the high reward to risk than it is simply to aim for maximum wins.
Summary of what’s important to be a profitable trader.
So I hope that helps explain that scenario. I think it’s really important that you you understand that because it will massively, potentially change it or help you with your trading, but change the way you’re thinking of trading and get right to looking for high quality trades that are going to more likely give you high reward to risk.
Have your low controlled risk on every single trade. High profitable trades. Think of it as stepping. You have like, little losses, big gains, little losses, big gains like that. That’s how you become successful and profitable. Far more so than worrying just about you win rate.
If you’d like to find out more about that and you’ve not been on my masterclass yet, click on the link that you’ll find probably below this video or on this page.
17 minutes Masterclass and Book a Call.
It takes you through to a 17 minute free on demand, webinar masterclass and I’ll explain about what we do, how we trade, how we teach, how we can help you. If you’d like to book a call. You’ll find the link also here.
Blueberry Markets as a Forex Broker.
And if they’re looking for a high quality forex broker, I can highly recommend Blueberry Markets. I’ll put a link to them here as well. They offer not just the forex market but other markets like indices, metals, commodities, cryptos as well. Great bunch of people, high quality service and highly recommend them.
So if you have any questions that you’d like me to answer or any topics you like me to discuss on future videos and podcasts like this, send me an email or drop a comment.
Comments, Like & Subscribe.
Don’t forget to like and subscribe! I’ll see this time next week. This is Andrew Mitchem here from The Forex Trading Coach. Happy trading. Bye for now.
