Trade Journal Guide: Win Rate, Expectancy & Equity Curve

Your Memory Is a Terrible Trading Record

Ask most traders whether they are profitable and you get a feeling, not a number. Memory is selective: the winners feel bigger than they were, the losers get quietly filed away, and the flat middle disappears entirely. A trading edge is a statistical property — it only shows up across dozens or hundreds of trades — so any assessment based on how the last few trades felt is worthless. The only way to know whether you have an edge is to write every trade down and let the aggregate speak.

This guide explains what a journal actually computes, why each statistic matters, and how to use the trade journal & performance tracker to turn a raw list of trades into win rate, expectancy, profit factor, drawdown, and a live equity curve. Everything runs in your browser — your data is saved locally and never uploaded.

The Numbers That Actually Matter

A handful of statistics, taken together, tell you almost everything about a strategy. The journal computes each one from your logged trades:

• Net P&L — the sum of every trade’s result. P&L per trade is (exit − entry) × quantity, with the sign flipped for shorts.
• Win Rate — winning trades divided by decided trades (wins plus losses). A high win rate means little on its own; it must be read alongside the average win and loss.
• Average Win vs Average Loss — the mean size of your winners and losers. A 40% win rate is highly profitable if winners are three times the size of losers.
• Profit Factor — gross profit ÷ gross loss. Above 1.0 is profitable; 1.5 and up is generally considered a robust edge.
• Expectancy — your average result per trade, the single most important figure. It combines win rate and win/loss size into one number.
• Maximum Drawdown — the largest peak-to-trough drop in your cumulative equity. This is the pain you must be able to sit through, and it drives how aggressively you can size.

Expectancy: The One Number to Watch

Expectancy is what ties everything together. Conceptually it is:

Expectancy = (Win% × Avg Win) − (Loss% × Avg Loss)

A positive expectancy means that, on average, each trade adds to your account — so the more you trade the setup, the more you make. A negative expectancy means the opposite, and no amount of position sizing can rescue it. If you log a Risk $ value for every trade, the journal reports expectancy in R multiples (result ÷ risk) instead of dollars, which normalises trades of different sizes onto one scale. Expectancy is the direct input to sizing math — see the trading expectancy and Kelly guide for how it drives how much to bet.

MAE and Efficiency: Grading Your Exits

If you also record the worst and best price a trade reached before you closed it, the journal computes two more advanced stats. MAE (Maximum Adverse Excursion) is how much heat a trade took — how far it went against you — before it worked out; consistently large MAE on winners hints your stops are set too tight. Efficiency is the percentage of a trade’s best paper profit you actually captured at exit; a low average efficiency suggests you are leaving winners on the table by exiting early.

Worked Example

Suppose you log five trades of one unit each. The table shows each result and the running equity:

#	Side	Entry	Exit	P&L	Cumulative
1	Long	$100	$110	+$10	$10
2	Long	$110	$105	−$5	$5
3	Short	$120	$110	+$10	$15
4	Long	$100	$98	−$2	$13
5	Long	$50	$60	+$10	$23

From these five trades the journal derives: Net P&L $23; Win Rate 3 of 5 = 60%; Gross profit $30 and gross loss $7, so Profit Factor = 30 ÷ 7 = 4.29; Avg Win $10 and Avg Loss −$3.50; and Expectancy = 23 ÷ 5 = $4.60 per trade (equivalently, 0.6 × 10 − 0.4 × 3.5 = 4.6). The equity peaked at $10 after trade 1, dipped to $5 by trade 2, so the Max Drawdown along the way is $5. Five trades is far too few to trust — but the machinery is identical at 500.

How to Use the Trade Journal

Add trades on the left; statistics and the equity curve update on the right. To log a trade:

1. Date — the trade date (optional but useful for ordering the equity curve).
2. Symbol — the ticker, e.g. BTCUSDT.
3. Long / Short — toggle the side; this decides how P&L is signed.
4. Entry and Exit — your fill prices for the two legs.
5. Quantity — position size in units of the base asset.
6. Risk $ (optional) — how much you risked on the trade. Fill it in for every trade and expectancy is reported in R multiples; leave it blank and expectancy shows in dollars.
7. Worst Price Reached (optional) and Best Price Reached (optional) — the lowest/highest price the trade hit while open. These unlock the Avg MAE and Avg Efficiency stats. The tool is side-aware, so you just enter the worst and best price — no need to reason about “highest vs lowest.”

Click Add Trade and it appears in the Trade Log with its P&L, R multiple, and efficiency. The stat tiles show Net P&L, Win Rate, Trades, Expectancy, Profit Factor, Avg Win, Avg Loss, Max Drawdown, Avg MAE, and Avg Efficiency, and the Equity Curve plots your cumulative result. Already have a history elsewhere? Use Import CSV with columns for date, symbol, side, entry, exit, qty, risk, and optional maePrice/mfePrice — the journal recalculates everything. Export CSV backs up your data or moves it between devices, and Clear all wipes it.

Privacy and Caveats

Because the journal is a discipline tool, a few points matter more than the arithmetic:

• Your data stays in your browser. Trades are stored via local storage and are never uploaded to any server. That also means clearing your browser data or switching devices loses them — export a CSV to keep a backup.
• Log net results, not gross. Enter fills that reflect what actually happened, so your statistics are honest. Fees and slippage quietly erode expectancy.
• Sample size is everything. A 70% win rate over ten trades tells you nothing; the same over two hundred is meaningful. Resist the urge to judge a strategy early.
• Log losers too. The temptation to skip the embarrassing trades is exactly what corrupts the record. The whole value of the journal is that it does not flatter you.

A journal will not improve any single trade. What it does is make your edge — or its absence — visible, so that the decisions you refine actually move the numbers that decide whether you make money.