Expectancy per Trade Calculator

About this calculator

Expectancy per trade tells a trader what one average trade is statistically worth, combining win rate and average win/loss size into a single number: expectancy = (win rate × average win) − (loss rate × average loss). A positive expectancy means the trading system makes money over a large enough sample, regardless of any single trade's outcome; a negative expectancy means the system loses money even if individual trades occasionally win.

Traders and systematic strategy developers calculate expectancy because win rate alone is a poor measure of a strategy's quality — a system that wins 30% of the time can still be highly profitable if winners are much larger than losers, while a system that wins 70% of the time can lose money if losses are disproportionately large. Expectancy is also the building block for position-sizing decisions like the Kelly criterion.

This calculator takes your win rate, average winning trade and average losing trade and returns the expected value of one trade in dollars, so you can judge whether your strategy has a real statistical edge before committing more capital to it.