Win rate is the share of your closed trades with positive realized P&L. A 60% win rate means 6 out of 10 trades closed in the green.
It feels intuitive but it's the single most misleading number in a trading journal. A 90% win rate can lose money (think small wins, large losses), and a 30% win rate can compound aggressively (small losses, occasional huge wins). Win rate without average win-to-loss ratio is noise.
Pair it with average R-multiple and profit factor to get a real read. The expectancy formula — (winRate × avgWin) − (lossRate × avgLoss) — is what actually tells you whether the strategy has edge.
Statistically, win rate is also volatile on small samples. The 95% confidence interval on a 60% win rate from 20 trades runs roughly 40% to 78%. You need 100+ trades before the number stabilizes enough to be informative.