The number everyone quotes, and what it hides
This past week, I had a conversation that I keep having — in different forms, with different traders, at different stages of their journey. Someone shared their results with me. They were frustrated. Their winrate was sitting somewhere around 40%, and they felt like they were failing. They kept asking: how do I win more trades?
It's the wrong question. And it's one of the most common traps in retail trading.
Winrate is the first number traders learn to track. It feels intuitive — you won this trade, you lost that one, count them up. It's clean, it's simple, and it fits neatly into a scoreboard mentality. We're wired for it. Sports, school grades, video games — everything in life trains us to think that winning more often is the goal.
Markets don't care about that framing.
What I noticed this week, watching how traders around me were processing their recent sessions, was a consistent pattern: the ones feeling the most anxiety weren't necessarily the ones losing the most money. They were the ones measuring themselves against the wrong benchmark. One trader closed eight trades. Five were winners. Three were losers. He felt good about it. But the three losses were each roughly twice the size of any individual win. The math didn't care about his 62% winrate.
The other side of that coin was a quieter trader in our community who mentioned almost in passing that she'd had a "rough week" — more losses than wins. But when I asked her to walk me through it, the structure of her trades told a different story. Her losers were contained. Her winners had room to breathe.
Same market. Same week. Two completely different realities, depending on which number you were watching.
The metric that actually tells the truth
This is where the concept of expectancy becomes one of the most clarifying ideas in trading — and one of the least discussed in beginner spaces.
Expectancy, in plain terms, is the average amount you can expect to gain or lose per trade, taken across a large sample. It brings together two variables that winrate ignores entirely: how much you win when you're right, and how much you lose when you're wrong. The ratio between those two numbers — your risk-to-reward, or R:R — is what gives winrate its actual meaning.
Here's the uncomfortable truth: a trader winning 35% of their trades can be consistently profitable if their average winner is large relative to their average loser. Conversely, a trader winning 70% of their trades can be slowly bleeding out if their losses dwarf their wins. The math is unambiguous on this. A positive expectancy — even a modest one — compounds over time. A negative expectancy, regardless of how many green trades you post, does the same in the opposite direction.
This is something I spend a lot of time on in the Académie, not because it's complicated, but because it requires unlearning something. Traders have to actively dismantle the instinct to chase a higher winrate. That instinct usually leads to cutting winners too early (locking in the "W" before the trade has finished working) and holding losers too long (refusing to accept the "L" in hopes of a reversal). Both behaviours feel psychologically safe. Both behaviours are expectancy killers.
The harder discipline is almost counterintuitive: be comfortable losing more often, as long as the structure of your losses is controlled. Let winners run. Cut losers without hesitation. That's not a motivational poster — it's arithmetic.
I'll also say this: the traders I've seen make the most durable progress aren't the ones who suddenly started winning more trades. They're the ones who stopped treating each loss as evidence that something was broken, and started asking instead — was my risk defined? Did I follow the plan? What was the R:R on that setup? The scoreboard shifted from wins and losses to process and structure.
That shift is harder than it sounds. But it's the right shift.
What I'm watching this week
The broader question I'm sitting with going into the week ahead is about setup selectivity — specifically, whether the pressure to "be active" in the market leads traders to accept setups with compressed R:R ratios that would never pass a calm, pre-session review.
There are always periods where clean, high-quality configurations are sparse. The temptation in those stretches is to lower the bar — to take the 1:1 setup because there's nothing better available, to force a trade because the week feels too quiet. That's where expectancy quietly erodes, not in one dramatic blow, but trade by trade, in the small compromises.
I want to pay attention this week to how I respond to that pressure. Not to the market itself — to myself in front of the market. Are the setups I'm considering meeting the same structural criteria I'd apply in a high-conviction week? Or am I adjusting the standard to fit the desire to trade?
That's the level where expectancy is actually managed. Not on the spreadsheet after the fact — in the moment before entry.
— Mahugnon, depuis Montréal
⚠️ Personal observations for educational purposes only. Does not constitute financial advice. Trading derivatives carries a high risk of capital loss.
