TradePerformance

What is the break-even line telling me?

The win rate you would need, given how much your winners make relative to your losers, just to break even — and how far above or below it you actually are.

It is one sentence and it is the most useful line on the tab, because it connects two numbers people usually read separately.

It reads like this: winning some multiple for every 1 you lose, you need to win a certain percentage of the time just to break even; you win a different percentage; and the gap is your cushion, in percentage points.

The point is that neither number means anything alone. A 40% win rate is fine if your winners are three times your losers and fatal if they are the same size. This line does that arithmetic for you and states the result plainly.

It is deliberately blunt when the answer is bad — below break-even it says so in red rather than softening it, because that is the one case where a rounded-up "on track" would cost you money. It shows nothing at all until you have at least one loss, since there is no payoff ratio to compute before then.

the break-even line, doing the arithmetic in one sentence
the break-even line, doing the arithmetic in one sentence