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Your trading win rate is the percentage of trades that closed profitable — the most misleading metric in your journal unless paired with average R-multiple.

R-multiple measures each trade's profit or loss as a multiple of your initial risk — the metric that separates traders who survive from traders who get lucky.

Trading expectancy is the average dollar outcome per trade — the single number that tells you whether your edge is real or just noise dressed as strategy.

Trading profit factor is total winning dollars divided by total losing dollars — the one ratio that exposes whether your wins actually outweigh your losses.

The trading Sharpe ratio is your average return divided by the volatility of those returns — risk-adjusted performance that punishes a jagged equity curve.

Sortino ratio is the Sharpe ratio's honest sibling — same shape, but only downside volatility counts, because big winners aren't a bug, they're the point.

Trading drawdown is the peak-to-trough drop in your equity curve — depth matters, but duration is the number that quietly kills strategies that worked.

Trading Calmar ratio is annualized return divided by max drawdown — the cleaner metric for trend-followers because it doesn't punish upside volatility.

Trading recovery factor is net profit divided by max drawdown — the single number that prop firms care about most: how quickly you climb out of the hole.

Trading volatility is how much price moves over a given window — historical is the rear-view mirror; implied is what current options pricing actually expects.

Trading beta is how much your portfolio swings with the broader market — a beta of 1.5 means your equity curve moves 1.5x SPY, useful for sizing leverage.

Trading alpha is your return above what beta predicts — if you returned 15% with beta 1.0 and SPY did 10%, your alpha is 5%, and the edge is real, not luck.

Trading slippage is the gap between your expected fill price and the actual fill price — always negative on net, worse on illiquid names and market orders.

Information ratio is excess return divided by tracking error — the professional Sharpe variant allocators use to benchmark active managers against an index.

Omega ratio is the probability-weighted ratio of gains above a threshold to losses below it — a cleaner read than Sharpe on skewed return distributions.

Ulcer index measures both depth and duration of drawdowns combined — catches the slow-grind equity bleeds that Sharpe and Sortino completely miss in their math.

Gain-to-pain ratio is sum of all gains divided by sum of all pain (losses) — the most direct single-number expression of edge over a real trading window.

Value-at-Risk is a statistical max-loss estimate at a chosen confidence level — the risk metric every institutional desk reports to its risk committee daily.

Trading tilt is the stress-driven mental state — usually triggered by a losing streak — that wrecks decision quality before you even feel it happening.

Trading overconfidence is the systematic overestimation of your own skill — three lucky wins in a row can quietly set up an account-ending fourth bet.

Loss aversion in trading is the asymmetry where losses hurt about twice as much as equivalent gains feel good — the bias quietly running your exits.

A trading breakout is when price closes through a defined level — resistance, a range high, a prior pivot — with the volume to back it. Otherwise: fakeout.

A trading pullback is a counter-trend retracement inside a larger trend — higher win rate than a breakout, but the hard part is knowing when it's a reversal.

A trading fakeout is a false breakout — price pierces a key level, traps the breakout buyers, then reverses. Your journal is the only thing that proves it.

Position sizing is the math of deciding how many shares or contracts to trade — boring, mechanical, and the single highest-leverage discipline in trading.

A trading stop-loss is a pre-committed exit price that caps the loss on a trade — mental stops don't count, and the journals prove it under stress every time.

Risk of ruin is the probability that a losing streak wipes out your account before your edge has time to compound — the math most traders never want to run.

The Kelly fraction is the position size that maximizes long-run growth — mathematically optimal, and the fastest way to ruin if you overestimate your edge.

A daily loss limit is the dollar threshold at which you close the platform and walk away — the structural rule that stops a tilt spiral before it starts.

Trading risk-reward ratio is the ratio of potential profit to potential loss on a single trade — set at entry, where R-multiple is what you measure at exit.

A trailing stop is a stop-loss that moves with price as the trade runs in your favor — locks in less profit on continuation, saves more on hard reversals.

A trading take-profit is a pre-set exit price for your winners — most traders move them later, and the reasons usually turn out emotional, not analytical.

Trading hedging is offsetting the risk of one position with a related opposite position — it costs premium, and it should manage tail risk, not feel safer.

Gamma risk is how fast your option position delta changes — the metric that punishes large options books during big underlying moves and overnight gaps.

Theta decay is the daily premium an options buyer loses to time passing — options sellers best friend, options buyers worst enemy, and the silent killer.

Vega exposure is how sensitive an option position is to implied-volatility changes — the forgotten Greek that quietly explains many surprise P&L blowups.

A margin call is a broker demand to add cash or close positions when equity drops below maintenance — the mechanism that converts a drawdown into a catastrophe.

Liquidation is the forced position close that triggers when an account cannot cover margin — common in crypto and futures, rare for cash stock accounts.

Mean-reversion trading bets price returns to its average after stretching too far — the opposite of trend-following, and a different journal entry entirely.

Trend-following rides strong directional moves until they reverse — the most studied strategy in finance, with the most documented psychological cost.

Scalping captures a tiny per-trade edge at very high frequency — requires the lowest commissions, the fastest execution, and tolerance for endless small losses.

Swing trading holds positions multiple days to multiple weeks — the most accessible style for traders with a day job since it requires no intraday screen time.

Arbitrage profits from price discrepancies between markets or instruments — mostly hedge-fund territory; the retail-accessible versions are rare and crowded.