Excellent post. I have one question: Are you aware of any successful traders with a method that generates << 50% win rate but with positive expectancy overall? Thank you.
Curtis Faith was a successful trend follower with a low win rate. https://www.quantifiedstrategies.com/trend-following-strategy/
I think you will find a lot of successful traders who focus more on R/R than win rate. I can't find any numbers but O'Neil deciples are not concerned about win rate. Cut your losses. Make your winners count.
Sorry but IMO successful traders don't follow silly r/r's. Plans including where to enter, where to put stop exit if reason for entry is no longer valid and profit stop based on price action of some sort. Targets are wishful thinking, never knowing in advance what the right hand side of the chart will do. Meanwhile the other part of R/R; risk, is of an event happening. Not trade equity/margin deployed.
I didn't say they follow them I said they focus on them. I agree that you don't know where you will exit and because of that you follow whatever strategy you have. I didn't mean to imply that you set a target at some multiple of your risk, I meant that you want your winners to be greater than your losers. The stats I keep will tell me my winning percentage but it means nothing without knowing the size of the winners and losers. I like to consider myself a successful trader. I don't think I've ever had a greater than 50% win rate. My average win is usually 4 to 5 times my average loss.
It's difficult for me to give an accurate number because I fund my lifestyle expences out of my portfolio and they vary from year to year. Just taking growth of my liquid net worth is around 7% for the last 20 yrs
Yes, John Henry was like that and several Turtles too. But these people were trading long time ago. I have the impression that markets were different at that time. Or maybe I changed my style of trading over the years... For me profitability was always linked with a high winning rate. Especially in daytrading. I am not aming at high win rates. I just want to take all the waves and cut all my losses. That automatically results in high winning rates.
You can have both. I initally did not want to lose money, so I tried to improve my entries. As my entries became better and better, R/R as well as winrate became better. One does not exclude the other. If they focus on R/R and not on winrate, it means they have problems to limit the number of attempt to the only real good entries. They have to try many times to catch the right entry. They have maybe 30% good entries, while I have over 80%. Good entries are hugely important in trading. But oh so difficult to achieve consistently...