Win rate or risk-reward?
Every signal service leads with a win rate. Almost none of them publish the two numbers that decide whether the win rate means anything: the average size of a win, and the average size of a loss.
Without those, a win rate is unreadable. Here is why, and here are ours.
A 90% win rate that loses money
Take a strategy that wins 9 trades out of 10, making 5 pips each time, and loses the tenth for 60 pips. That is a 90% win rate, and it is the number that would appear in the advert. Across ten trades it makes 45 pips and gives back 60. It loses money, reliably, while looking like the best service you have ever seen.
Now take one that wins 4 times out of 10 for 40 pips and loses 6 times for 15. A 40% win rate, which no marketing department would print. It makes 160 and gives back 90. It is profitable, and it looks worse.
The win rate did not tell you which was which. The ratio between the average win and the average loss did.
The number that settles it
Expectancy is the average outcome of a trade once both the frequency and the size of each result are counted. It is the only figure you can multiply by "how many trades will I take" and get a meaningful answer.
Ours, across 1032 published trades since 2026-04-20:
- TP1 — 23.4% of trades, averaging +18.0 pips
- TP2 — 15.0% of trades, averaging +28.8 pips
- TP3 — 11.0% of trades, averaging +47.3 pips
- Break-even exits — 24.5% of trades, averaging +8.4 pips
- Stop losses — 26.0% of trades, averaging -16.4 pips
Weighted together that is 11.6 pips per trade. Our take-profit rate is 49.5%, which is nobody's idea of a headline, and the expectancy is positive anyway — because the average win is larger than the average loss.
That is the whole relationship. A high win rate is only good news when the wins are not smaller than the losses, and a modest win rate is not bad news when they are bigger.
Why services quote the win rate instead
Because it is the easiest number to inflate. Count break-even exits as wins and it climbs. Close trades early for a pip or two and it climbs further. Quietly drop the losers from the published list and it climbs as high as you like. None of those improve the account; all of them improve the advert.
Average win and average loss resist that treatment. You cannot make a 15-pip loss look like a 5-pip loss without simply not publishing it.
What to ask any service
- What is the average winning trade, in pips?
- What is the average losing trade, in pips?
- How many trades is that measured over? 1032 is enough to see a shape. Fifty is not.
- Does the win rate include break-even exits? Ours does, and we publish the split rather than burying it.
If a service cannot answer the first two, the win rate they quote is decoration. Ours are above, and every trade behind them is at teachtrades.com/results.