What Is a Good Win Rate for Futures Trading?
Nobody can tell you a good win rate without knowing what your winners and losers are worth, and most of the numbers traders quote each other are measured wrong anyway. This is the arithmetic, what your own number needs to clear, and how many trades you need before it means anything at all.
The short answer
A win rate on its own carries no information. Forty percent is excellent for one trader and a slow death for another, and the thing that decides which is the average size of a winner against the average size of a loser.
Call that ratio your payoff. If your average winner is twice your average loser, your payoff is 2. The win rate you have to beat to break even is one divided by one plus that number.
| Average winner vs loser | Win rate needed to break even |
|---|---|
| 0.5 to 1 | 66.7 percent |
| 1 to 1 | 50 percent |
| 1.5 to 1 | 40 percent |
| 2 to 1 | 33.3 percent |
| 3 to 1 | 25 percent |
So a trader winning 40 percent of the time at 2 to 1 makes 0.2R per trade on average. A trader winning 65 percent of the time at 0.5 to 1 loses 0.025R per trade. The second one has the better sounding number and the worse business, and if he only ever looks at his win rate he will never work out why the account keeps bleeding.
That is the whole answer. A good win rate is whatever beats the number in that table for the way you actually trade. If someone gives you a target percentage without asking about your stops, they are guessing.
Your win rate is probably measured wrong
Here is the part almost no journal handles properly.
A lot of futures trades finish flat. You get in, the trade does nothing, you take it off at your entry price or a tick either side. It is not a win. It is not a loss. It is a scratch, and you probably have more of them than you think.
Almost every tool classifies by the sign of the profit and loss, so a trade that closed two dollars down after commissions gets filed as a loss. Ten scratches in a hundred trades, filed as losses, and a real 50 percent win rate reads back as 45. You then go looking for a problem in your entries that does not exist.
Aurafy treats anything inside a tenth of an R either side of flat as breakeven and computes the win rate over decisive trades only, wins divided by wins plus losses. Scratches sit in their own bucket where you can count them, because a rising scratch count is real information. It usually means you are cutting trades before they have done anything, which is a different problem from picking bad ones and has a different fix.
Money numbers stay on the sign of the profit and loss, because a scratch that cost you eight dollars in commission really did cost you eight dollars. Only the classification changes.
How many trades before the number means anything
This is where most people fool themselves, and the honest answer is uncomfortable.
A win rate measured over a small sample has a wide margin of error. At around a 50 percent hit rate, here is what your sample size actually buys you at 95 percent confidence.
| Trades | Your true win rate is somewhere in |
|---|---|
| 20 | 28 to 72 percent |
| 50 | 36 to 64 percent |
| 100 | 40 to 60 percent |
| 200 | 43 to 57 percent |
| 500 | 46 to 54 percent |
Read the first row again. After twenty trades you know essentially nothing. A trader who wins 12 of 20 and concludes he has a 60 percent system is looking at a range that comfortably includes 40 percent.
This is why changing your strategy after a bad week is usually a mistake, and why a fortnight of good results is not evidence of anything. It is also why prop firm evaluations are so brutal. You are being asked to produce a specific outcome over a sample that is too small for skill to reliably show through.
Practical version: below 50 trades, do not draw conclusions from your win rate at all. Between 50 and 200, treat it as a rough direction. Past 200 in the same market with the same approach, start trusting it.
What to look at instead
If you only get one number, use expectancy in R. Multiply your win rate by your average winner in R, subtract your loss rate times your average loser in R. That single figure tells you whether the strategy makes money, and it moves when either half of the equation changes, which is exactly what you want.
After that, in order:
- Your average loser in R. If this is above 1, your stops are not holding, and no win rate saves you from that.
- Your largest loser against your average loser. One outlier three times normal size is a risk process problem, not a strategy problem.
- Win rate split by setup. An overall 48 percent hiding one setup at 62 and another at 31 is the most useful thing in most journals, and you cannot see it without tagging trades.
- Win rate by hour. Most futures traders have one part of the session that quietly funds the rest.
What our own accounts look like
Sixteen Aurafy accounts currently hold fifty or more real closed trades. That is a small sample and I am not going to pretend it is a study, but it is measured rather than remembered.
The average win rate across those accounts is 52.8 percent. Thirteen of the sixteen are net profitable, and four of those thirteen win less than half of their trades. Not one account with a win rate above 50 percent is losing money, which sounds meaningful until you remember there are sixteen of them.
The part I would take seriously is the four. Nearly a third of the profitable accounts would look broken to anyone judging them on hit rate alone.
If you are in an evaluation
Win rate is close to the least important thing on your screen. Prop accounts are ended by the distribution of your days, not by the ratio of your trades. A daily loss limit does not care that you win 60 percent of the time, and a consistency rule can fail you for having one day that was too good.
We covered those separately: the daily loss limit, trailing drawdown, and the consistency rule. If you are funded or trying to be, those three decide your outcome long before your hit rate does.
Getting your own numbers
All of this needs your actual trades, correctly imported, with commissions that match what you really pay. A win rate computed on a file that dropped a third of your fills is worse than no number at all. If your totals do not line up with your broker, start with why a journal disagrees with a broker, because everything above is built on that arithmetic being right first.
Aurafy is free for the journal itself. Drop a CSV on the homepage and you will see your win rate, your expectancy and your scratch count before you make an account.