Trade calculators
The move required to cover spread, commission and financing before anything is profit.
The move required to cover spread, commission and financing before anything is profit. The page states the equation, the units it expects and the rounding it applies, so the result can be reproduced by hand.
A calculator gives you a number. This one feeds the next: account to risk, risk to position size, position size to the trade, and the trade to expectancy, drawdown and risk of ruin.
See the performance tools →Costs are subtracted from the reward and added to the risk, because they are paid whichever way the trade goes.
Risking 100 to make 200, with no costs and then with 10 of cost:
Three and a half points of win rate, from a cost of 10 against a risk of 100. On tighter stops the penalty is larger.
One divided by one plus your reward-to-risk ratio. At 1:1 that is 50%, at 1:2 it is 33.3%, at 1:3 it is 25% — before costs, which raise all three.
In proportion to how tight your stop is. A 1-pip spread on a 10-pip stop moves the break-even win rate by several points; on a 100-pip stop it is negligible.
It converts some winners into scratches and does nothing to the losers, so it lowers both the win rate and the average win. Whether that is worth the reduced variance is a question about you, not about the arithmetic.
A calculator answers one question and raises the next. These are the ones this figure feeds into.
Round-turn cost per trade, and what share of your risk it eats.
Compare reward with risk, and read off the win rate that ratio needs to break even.
Average outcome per trade from win rate and average win and loss. The number win rate hides.
Break-even Calculator · rounding shown to the precision displayed