Most traders obsess over one number: how much money they made or lost this month. It's understandable — P&L is direct and immediate. But if that's the only metric you're watching, you're flying almost completely blind.
The problem is that a positive P&L can hide terrible habits, and a negative P&L can mask an improving strategy. To actually understand your trading — to know whether you have a real edge and what's killing your results — you need to look deeper.
Here are the six metrics every serious trader should track, what they mean, and how to use them.
1. Win Rate
Win rate is the percentage of your trades that close in profit. If you place 100 trades and 55 are profitable, your win rate is 55%.
On its own, win rate tells you very little. A trader with a 30% win rate can be enormously profitable if their winners are large enough. A trader with an 80% win rate can still lose money if their losers are catastrophic. The mistake beginners make is chasing a high win rate as a goal in itself.
What to look for: Consistency. If your win rate swings wildly from month to month, that's usually a sign of emotional trading rather than a disciplined strategy.
2. Profit Factor
Profit factor is the ratio of your total gross profit to your total gross loss. A profit factor of 1.5 means you make £1.50 for every £1.00 you lose across all trades.
Rule of thumb: A profit factor above 1.0 means you're profitable overall. Above 1.5 is solid. Above 2.0 is excellent. Below 1.0 and you're losing money regardless of how your win rate looks.
Profit factor is powerful because it combines both your win rate and your average risk-to-reward ratio into one number. It's one of the fastest ways to assess whether a strategy has a genuine edge.
3. Expectancy
Expectancy tells you how much you expect to win or lose, on average, per trade. It's calculated as:
Expectancy = (Win Rate × Average Win) − (Loss Rate × Average Loss)
A positive expectancy means that, over a large enough sample size, you will make money. A negative expectancy means you will lose money regardless of short-term luck.
If your expectancy is £8 per trade and you take 200 trades per year, your expected annual profit is £1,600 — before considering position sizing. Scaling up a positive-expectancy strategy is how professional traders grow accounts.
4. Maximum Drawdown
Drawdown measures the largest peak-to-trough decline in your account equity. If your account hit £12,000 and then fell to £9,000 before recovering, your maximum drawdown was 25%.
Drawdown is your risk reality check. You might have an excellent average return, but if your drawdown regularly hits 40%, you're one bad month away from a blown account — or a margin call that forces you out before your strategy recovers.
What to watch: Most professional traders target a maximum drawdown below 20%. If you're regularly exceeding that, your position sizing or risk management needs attention.
5. Performance by Session, Symbol and Day
This is where most traders find their most actionable insights. When you break down your performance by:
- Trading session — Are you consistently losing during the Asian session but profitable during London open?
- Symbol or pair — Are two specific pairs responsible for 80% of your losses?
- Day of week — Do you trade poorly on Mondays? Do you overtrade on Fridays?
…you start to find the hidden patterns that are costing you money. Often, a trader who appears to be struggling overall is actually profitable in a specific context — they're just diluting those results by trading in conditions where they have no edge.
6. Average Risk-to-Reward Ratio
Your risk-to-reward ratio (RR) compares how much you risk on a trade to how much you stand to gain. A 1:2 RR means you risk £50 to make £100.
Combined with your win rate, RR determines whether your strategy is viable long-term. A strategy with a 40% win rate and a 1:2 RR has positive expectancy. The same 40% win rate with a 1:0.8 RR is a losing strategy.
Tracking your average actual RR — not your planned RR — also reveals whether you're letting losers run and cutting winners short. That single habit destroys more trading accounts than any other.
Track all of this automatically
Tracker Fx calculates every one of these metrics for you — automatically, in real time, from your connected cTrader or MetaTrader accounts. No spreadsheets. No manual work.
Start Free TrialPutting It All Together
No single metric tells the full story. A trader with a 65% win rate, a 1.4 profit factor, positive expectancy, controlled drawdown, and clearly better performance on specific pairs and sessions — that trader knows exactly where their edge lies and where it doesn't.
That clarity is what separates traders who improve from traders who repeat the same mistakes indefinitely.
The good news is that you don't need to calculate any of this manually. Modern trading journals do it automatically. The hard part isn't tracking the numbers — it's acting on what they tell you.
Start by identifying your worst-performing day of the week and your worst-performing symbol. Remove or reduce those from your trading for one month. Most traders are surprised by how much improvement comes from subtraction alone.