A strategy that wins 90% of the time can lose money, and one that wins 40% of the time can quietly build a fortune. That isn't a riddle — it's what happens when you read one statistic without the other two. This guide explains the three numbers behind every table on TradingPal, in plain English, with the arithmetic shown.
Live backtest numbers on this page updated Jul 2, 2026.
A win rate is the percentage of your trades that made money. Count the trades that ended in profit, divide by the total number of trades you took, and you have it. Nothing more mysterious than that.
A worked example: say you took 20 trades last month. Eleven of them closed with a profit — even a small one counts — and nine closed with a loss. Your win rate is 11 ÷ 20, or 55%.
It's the most natural number in the world to care about, because it feels like a grade on a test: more wins, better trader. That instinct is exactly what this article is here to correct. Win rate is the first number everyone looks at — and the most misleading one to look at alone.
Here's the honest answer most articles won't give you: the question has no answer on its own, because a win rate says nothing about the SIZE of the wins and losses. It counts how often you were right — not what being right paid, or what being wrong cost.
Watch the trap in action. Imagine a trader who wins 9 trades out of 10, making $100 each time — $900 in the bank. On the tenth trade she has no exit plan, holds on hoping, and loses $1,500. Add it up: $900 won, $1,500 lost. She's down $600, with a 90% win rate on her scorecard.
Now flip it. Another trader wins only 4 trades out of 10, but each win makes $300 and every loss is cut quickly at $100. Four wins earn $1,200; six losses cost $600. He pockets $600 while being wrong most of the time.
So a 40% win rate just beat a 90% win rate, comfortably. A “good” win rate only means something next to the average size of the wins and losses — which is exactly what the next two numbers measure.
Profit factor is all the dollars you won divided by all the dollars you lost. It's the one-number lie detector for the trap above: it doesn't care how often you won, only whether the money actually added up.
Reading it is simple — above 1 means the strategy made money overall, below 1 means it lost. Calculating it takes three small steps:
Total the profit from every winning trade. Using our 20-trade month: the eleven winners made $2,200 altogether.
Total the loss from every losing trade, written as a positive number. The nine losers cost $1,600 altogether.
Winnings ÷ losses. $2,200 ÷ $1,600 = 1.38 — for every dollar this strategy lost, it won $1.38. Now run the same math on the 90% trader from above: $900 ÷ $1,500 = 0.6. Her losing month is exposed instantly, no matter how shiny the win rate looked.
Expectancy is your average result per trade — what one typical trade is worth once the winners and losers cancel out. Traders measure it in a unit called R, which is simply the amount you risked on the trade. We explained R fully in our risk/reward guide; the short version is that a planned loss is −1R, and a win worth twice what you risked is +2R.
To find expectancy, add up all your results in R and divide by the number of trades. Say you took ten trades: four winners at +2R and six losers at −1R. That's +8R minus 6R, or +2R across ten trades — an expectancy of +0.2R per trade.
That +0.2R looks tiny, but it's the whole game. It means every time you take this setup, you earn about a fifth of what you risked, on average. Repeated a few hundred times with losses capped at −1R, that compounds into a real edge. And a negative expectancy means the opposite: no amount of discipline saves a strategy that loses money per trade on average.
Win rate and win size sit on opposite ends of a see-saw. Strategies that win very often usually make small profits each time — quick in-and-out styles live here. Strategies that win rarely often catch huge moves when they finally do — patient trend-following styles live there. Both can be genuinely profitable, and both can be sold to you dishonestly using one flattering number.
So read the three together. Win rate tells you how often it works — and what a normal losing streak will feel like, which matters more for your nerves than your wallet. Profit factor tells you whether the dollars net out. Expectancy tells you what one average trade is worth in R.
One more habit protects you from fooling yourself: always check the sample size. Ten trades can produce any of these numbers by pure luck; hundreds start to mean something. That's the whole reason backtesting exists — we wrote a separate plain-English guide on how that counting is done.
TradingPal doesn't quote textbook folklore for its patterns. We re-run the full test every night across 500+ stocks — roughly 63,000 simulated trades across all the patterns — and publish whatever comes out. The table below is that output, live: each pattern's win rate, its average return measured in R, its profit factor where shown, and the number of trades behind it.
Read it exactly the way this article taught you. Don't crown the pattern with the highest win rate — look at it next to the average R, and trust the rows with big samples more than the rows with few trades.
One example of what this kind of counting buys: in an entry study across roughly 54,000 backtested trades, buying at the pattern's line won just as often as waiting and buying at the day's closing price — but made about 28% more, purely from getting the better price. No amount of chart-staring produces a finding like that. Only the count could tell us.
| Pattern | Usual break | Win rate | Avg return | Backtested trades | Fresh (45d) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bull Pennant | Up | 55.2% | +0.58R | 13,034 | 80 |
| Bear Pennant | Down | 44.1% | +0.15R | 11,004 | 52 |
| Ascending Triangle | Up | 55.2% | +0.58R | 13,034 | 14 |
| Descending Triangle | Down | 44.1% | +0.15R | 11,004 | 6 |
| Symmetrical Triangle | Either way | 55.2% | +0.58R | 13,034 | 99 |
| Falling Wedge | Up | 53.9% | +0.38R | 13,048 | 84 |
| Rising Wedge | Down | 49.3% | +0.13R | 14,154 | 56 |
Historical results of a simulated strategy, refreshed nightly. Triangle rows show their usual break direction's family; each guide breaks out both directions.
These three statistics aren't buried in a report — they're the furniture of the app. On the screener, the panel on the left rail shows the current pattern family's full track record: win rate, average return in R, profit factor, and the number of trades behind them. That's the exact panel below, live.
You'll meet the same numbers in two more places: every setup tile carries that stock's own win-rate badge for the pattern it's showing (a 62% badge means THAT stock's history with THAT pattern, not folklore), and when a pattern is playing out on a chart, the copilot quotes the follow-through rate right in its plain-English read. One vocabulary, everywhere.
Not a screenshot — this is the live panel from the screener, showing the current all-patterns backtest. It refreshes after every nightly scan.
Educational content, not investment advice. Backtest statistics are historical results of a simulated strategy, refreshed nightly — they describe the past, not the next trade.