Why a 90% Winning System is a Bad Idea

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#521: Why a 90% Winning System is a Bad Idea

In this video:

00:26 – Traders get excited over win rates 

01:32 – Small gains and big losses

02:47 – My way of trading

03:34 – Closed trades from this week   

04:44 – Book a call with myself and my team

05:01 – Blueberry Markets

I'm going to explain why a 90% winning rate trading system is not a good idea. Let's talk about that and more right now.

Hey there, Forex traders! Andrew Mitchem here at the Forex Trading Coach. With video and podcast number 521.

Traders get excited over win rates 

Now I want to talk about win rates. You see so many people get very excited with win rates and they tend to put almost like too much emphasis on a win rate of a system and the strategy and especially a lot of inexperienced people, they see something that's got, let's say, like a 90% win rate and they think has to be the answer to their successes and it has to be a fantastic trading system.

I can tell you that is not the case. Now, a little while ago, I was talking to someone who had a 90% winning system and he was losing quite a lot of money. And as a new trader, you might question like, how is that possible? And as a more experienced trader and a profitable trader, I can tell you the win rate really doesn't matter quite as much as you may think.

Yes, it's important, but it is certainly not the most important aspect and the most experienced and most profitable Traders have win rates that are drastically lower than and sometimes pretty quite a lot lower than what you might actually think. Yet, they are very profitable. How has that happened?

Small gains and big losses

Well, the issue with most people is, first of all, they trade with pips and the guy that has the 90% win rate. That was a problem also. But what he was doing was having lots of small gains. Now, let's use the PIP example and let's say he had ten trades. Now 90% win rate, of course, means nine out of his ten trades were profitable. Now, let's say he was making, pick a figure. Ten pips per profitable trade let’s say and again you can see why I don't trade pips but let's go with it because that's what he was doing.

Therefore, nine trades, ten pips profit means even if we're not worrying about spread and we're saying that's ten pips net, which by the way it wasn't, but let's say it was to make his system even better, he's made 90 pips. The problem was that when he had one losing trade, let's say he lost 100 pips on that trade, he was then negative ten pips, yet he had a 90% win rate system.

And you can only imagine how much damage that would do psychologically when you get smashed by a big losing trade like that. And that becomes the problem.

My way of trading

Now, if you've been following me for some time, you would know the first of all, the key to trading. Not only do you need a successful system, but you need to have low and controlled risk per trade and forget pips.

So with my personal trading, I never risk more than half of 1% per trade. But also it's very important that you have high return trade, so high reward to risk profitable trade. So with the guy that had the 90% winning system but was losing money, he had lots of small gains. One big loss and big losses with me is the opposite.

When I have losses, I have small losses, but when I have gains I have big profitable gains. And that that change of mindset and that flipping around of the wins and the losses is one of the keys to success.

Closed trades from this week   

Now, just this week, I'm going to read some examples here. Just this week we've had a monthly chart trade close.

We're now into October that trades been open since March on the ChinaH. The Chinese index that made a 4.