Your Win Rate Is Lying to You: 4 Numbers in MT5 That Show If Your Trading Really Works

Most traders judge themselves by one number: the win rate. 70% winning trades feels great. But plenty of accounts with a 70% win rate are slowly going to zero, and plenty with 40% are growing every month.

The win rate tells you how often you win. It says nothing about how much. Here are four numbers that tell the real story, and how to see them in MetaTrader in a few seconds.

1. Profit Factor

Gross profit divided by gross loss. Above 1.0 you make money, below 1.0 you lose it.

• 1.0 – 1.3: fragile. A few bad days can wipe out a month.
• 1.3 – 2.0: healthy for most manual traders.
• Above 2.0: excellent, or a sample that is still too small.

A 70% win rate with a profit factor of 0.9 means your few losses are bigger than all your wins together.

2. Average win vs average loss

If your average loss is three times your average win, you need to win 75% of the time just to break even. This is the classic trap of moving the stop loss “just a bit further” and closing winners too early. Watch this ratio every week: if it gets worse, your discipline is slipping before your balance shows it.

3. Maximum drawdown

The deepest fall from a peak of your equity. It tells you how much pain your strategy needs to make its profit. A strategy that makes 20% a year with a 40% drawdown is very hard to follow in real life: most people give up at the bottom.

4. Results by hour and by day

This is the one almost nobody checks, and the one that pays fastest. Many traders discover that most of their losses come from one session (the New York open, Friday afternoon, late-night trades) and that simply skipping those hours turns a losing month into a winning one.

How to see these numbers in MT5 and MT4

MetaTrader has a report in the History tab, but it is built for strategy testing, not for day-to-day trading.

I built a free indicator for this: SAYON Performance. You drop it on any chart and it reads your account history directly: balance, profit factor, win rate, average win and loss, drawdown and the equity curve, always up to date and in one clean window. It sends no orders and changes nothing on the account.

Example: 71 trades, 69% win rate, profit factor 3.11, max drawdown -12.26%: all four numbers in one window.

Free version for MT5: https://www.mql5.com/en/market/product/199994
Free version for MT4: https://www.mql5.com/en/market/product/201120

If you want the deeper analysis, SAYON Performance PRO adds the trading calendar (results day by day) and the hours-and-days breakdown, the section that shows where your losses really come from.

PRO for MT5: https://www.mql5.com/en/market/product/200188
PRO for MT4: https://www.mql5.com/en/market/product/201115

One habit to start this week

Every Friday, before closing the platform, look at these four numbers for the week. Write down one thing to change. In a month you will know more about your trading than a year of “feeling” ever told you.

Questions or ideas for new statistics? Write them in the comments, I read them all.