{"id":439875,"date":"2026-10-12T18:21:01","date_gmt":"2026-10-12T11:21:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.swingfish.trade\/blog\/market-news\/why-winning-more-trades-doesnt-always-make-you-a-profitable-trader-439875\/"},"modified":"2026-10-12T18:21:01","modified_gmt":"2026-10-12T11:21:01","slug":"why-winning-more-trades-doesnt-always-make-you-a-profitable-trader","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.swingfish.trade\/blog\/market-news\/why-winning-more-trades-doesnt-always-make-you-a-profitable-trader-439875\/","title":{"rendered":"Why winning more trades doesn&#8217;t always make you a profitable trader"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\" class=\"text-align-justify\">If someone walks up to you and says that they have more winning trades than they do losing ones, you would think that they are probably making bank. I mean, it sounds perfectly logical, no? If you&#8217;re getting most of your trades right, then it makes sense that you should be making money.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\" class=\"text-align-justify\">But what if I told you that winning more trades doesn&#8217;t necessarily mean that you would be making money? It sounds convoluted now but that&#8217;s where understanding your win rate and how that ties to risk\/reward becomes important.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\" class=\"text-align-justify\">If you&#8217;re winning more than you are losing, that means you should have a win rate of over 50% in your trades. It can be something like 60% or maybe even higher like 80%. However, a high win rate\u00a0doesn&#8217;t automatically mean that you&#8217;re going to be a profitable trader. The more important part of the equation to consider is arguably how much money are you actually making when you win compared to how much money are you losing when the trade goes bad.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\" class=\"text-align-justify\">To make things easier to understand, let&#8217;s go back to the apple store example again from our previous educational posts (yes, I love my apples).<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\" class=\"text-align-justify\">Just imagine you are buying apples from a supplier and then selling them to customers, hoping to make a tidy profit along the way. And let&#8217;s say out of every 10 apple sales, you manage to make money on 6 of them. That&#8217;s a  win rate of 60%. Sounds decent enough, no? But here&#8217;s the catch.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\" class=\"text-align-justify\">Suppose you make $3 in profit on each successful apple sale. But during times when business is poor and for some reason you&#8217;re forced to sell the apples at a discount, you end up losing $6 instead. After 10 apple sales, here is how the numbers add up:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>6 profitable sales at $3 each = $18 in profits<\/li>\n<li>4 losing sales at $6 each = $24 in losses<\/li>\n<li>Overall sales = $6 loss<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\" class=\"text-align-justify\">Ouch. You&#8217;re getting things right more often than you do wrong, but yet you still end up losing money. That&#8217;s not the way to run a successful business now is it? So, what exactly was the problem?<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\" class=\"text-align-justify\">\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\" class=\"text-align-justify\">From a trading perspective, this is where\u00a0the concept of risk\/reward ratio comes into play. To put things more simply, it is how you handle the approach of measuring how much\u00a0money that you are risking on a trade compared to how much that you are hoping to make.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\" class=\"text-align-justify\">Going back to the apple store example, you are essentially risking $6 to make just $3. That is a risk\/reward ratio of just 1:0.5. But what if we flipped those numbers around instead?<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\" class=\"text-align-justify\">Let&#8217;s say you are still making money from 6 out of every 10 apple sales, but this time you are making $6 on a good sale and only losing $3 on a bad sale. Now, this is how those numbers would look like after another 10 apple sales:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>6 profitable sales at $6 each = $36 in profits<\/li>\n<li>4 losing sales at $3 each = $12 in losses<\/li>\n<li>Overall sales = $24 profit<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\" class=\"text-align-justify\">It&#8217;s the same win rate but the outcome is entirely different.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\" class=\"text-align-justify\">Now of course, actual trading in itself is not that straightforward. There are so many other things to consider, besides the fact that you also can&#8217;t just simply decide\u00a0to make bigger profits and take smaller losses every time. Markets don&#8217;t always play out to how we think they might and that can change our trading conviction as well as where we place our stops and profit targets.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\" class=\"text-align-justify\">But if there&#8217;s one lesson to be learned here, it is that\u00a0the more important thing isn&#8217;t necessarily about trying to win as many trades as possible. Finding the right balance\u00a0between your win rate and how much you&#8217;re actually making or losing on each trade is arguably even more crucial to a trader.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\" class=\"text-align-justify\">Let&#8217;s be real. I&#8217;d much rather have a lower win rate but stay profitable than wanting to be right more often, only to have my losing trades wipe out all my money.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\" class=\"text-align-justify\">\n<p>                            This article was written by Justin Low at investinglive.com.<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If someone walks up to you and says that they have more winning trades than they do losing ones, you would think that they are probably making bank. I mean, it sounds&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":216,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[86],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-439875","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-market-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swingfish.trade\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/439875","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swingfish.trade\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swingfish.trade\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swingfish.trade\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/216"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swingfish.trade\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=439875"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.swingfish.trade\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/439875\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swingfish.trade\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=439875"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swingfish.trade\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=439875"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swingfish.trade\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=439875"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}