You don't need to win most trades
This is the most liberating fact in trading, and the one that takes longest to believe: you can be wrong more often than you are right and still make money. What decides the outcome is not how often you win. It is how much you make when you are right compared with how much you lose when you are wrong.
Traders spend years chasing a higher win rate. Almost none of them audit the number that actually pays them.
Speaking in R
Stop thinking in dollars for a moment and think in R — one R is the amount you risk on a trade. Risk $50 with a 25-pip stop, and R = $50. A trade that makes $100 made 2R. A trade that hits your stop lost 1R.
R matters because it makes every trade comparable. A gold trade risking $50 and a EURUSD trade risking $50 are both 1R, even though the pip distances look nothing alike. It also stops account size from confusing you: 2R is 2R whether you trade $500 or $50,000.
The math that surprises everyone
Take a trader who wins only 40% of the time, but whose winners are twice their risk. Over 100 trades: