Winrate doesn’t necessarily matter as big as RR, try to get 1:3+ RR minimum on your trades and the required winrate is around 35% to be profitable. Much easier on the psyche.
They still (as ever, historically) have different belief-sets in Lancashire from those prevalent in Yorkshire.
All my own experiences over the decades I've been interested in trading, and interested in discussing techniques and methods with successful retail traders, have gradually but inexorably led me to the conclusion: that reward-to-risk ratios of 3.0 or more are very, very rarely viable or profitable over the long term for retail traders. And the long term's what matters, isn't it?
There are some very specific reasons for this, IMO.
With a 25% win-rate, over a series of about 600 trades, the chances are around 50/50 that you'll have a consecutive losing run of 20 or more trades. Not that "longest losing runs" are the real problem, anyway: "long losing patches" are far more common (by which I mean "series of consecutive results including mostly losers and a few winners which are financially equivalent in their overall outcome to a long losing run of consecutive trades"). And over a much longer run than 600 trades, the chances of hitting 45 losers over 50 consecutive trades are getting up toward 100%.
The specific problem with this is that when it happens (NB: not "if" it happens), it's going to be almost impossible to judge whether you're just having a "perfectly predictable really bad run" or what you're doing is no longer working, and you're just going to continue to lose more and more with it, if you continue. And that's a really nasty but entirely foreseeable problem one surely must try to avoid?
All of which is why in practice it's far more comfortable, IMO, to have a win-rate much closer to 50% than anyone's ever likely to achieve with a 1:3+ RR. But I wish you well with it, if you can really pull it off, long term!
The following 2 users say Thank You to Tymbeline for this post:
