Good Charts.
Better Questions.

You took 50 trades and won 29. That's 58%. The math takes four seconds. The problem is 58% doesn't tell us whether you made a dollar, because you can win four out of five trades and still be bleeding out. So let's get the number, and then let's talk about the number it actually has to beat before it means anything at all.

Nobody likes talking about losing streaks. Winning streaks? Absolutely. We will discuss those at brunch. But five losses in a row? Suddenly everyone has somewhere else to be. The problem is that losing streaks are completely normal — even for a profitable trading method. If your method doesn't win 100% of the time, consecutive losses aren't evidence that the universe has singled you out for punishment. They're math.

You win 45% of your trades, your winners average 2R, your losers average 1R. Good? Bad? You honestly can't tell by looking at it, which is annoying, because those are the three numbers everyone throws around. Expectancy folds all three together and tells you what one trade has actually been worth. It also tells you when the strategy you designed and the strategy you're really trading are two different things. That part's uncomfortable but you'd rather know.

You got in at 1.1725, price is at 1.1768, and you worked out 43 pips before you finished reading the sentence. Then you switch to a JPY pair and the decimals have moved. Or your broker shows five of them and one is doing something you can't identify. Measuring distance in pips is the least glamorous thing on the resources page, and it's underneath your stop, your target, your R, and every honest number in your journal. Let's go through what the distance means once you have it

Checking your P&L isn't a review. Here's a real weekly process — rules, clean setups vs reaches, loss patterns, and what went right.

Your account hit $10,000 and it's at $8,000 now, so you're down two grand. Which tells you almost nothing, because two grand means something completely different on a $10,000 account than a $100,000 one. What you want is how far you've fallen from your peak, not your deposit, and most people measure that wrong the first time. Let's sort out what the number actually is, what to compare it against, and what to do when it comes out bigger than your history says it should.

Determine how to manage your trade or even to enter based on how much price has moved in a dayl

Setting a 90 pip goal is easy. Knowing where you actually stand by Thursday, after a good day, a no-trade day, and a few pips given back, is where it gets fuzzy. This does the arithmetic so you're not doing it in your head with a position open. It'll also tell you what you'd need to average over your remaining sessions, which is useful right up until you start treating it like an instruction. Let's talk about the difference, and about what a realistic pip goal even is.

You made $100 on a trade. Was that good? No idea, and neither do you, until you know what you put up to get it. Risk $25 for that hundred and you did something great. Risk $500 for it and you did something else entirely. R is the unit that sorts this out, and it's the reason your journal can finally tell you whether your method works or whether you just had a big account that month.

Twenty pips of stop, forty pips of target, 1:2. That's the whole calculation, and if you can divide you already know how to do it. What nobody explains is what to do with the number once you've got it, which is why so many people end up dragging their target out to 100 pips because 1:5 looks better than 1:2. It doesn't make the trade better. It makes the target farther away. Let's go through what the ratio actually tells you, what it can't tell you, and the one honest way to

Buy at 1.1700, want 25 pips, stop goes at 1.1675. Easy, right up until you're on a JPY pair with five decimals showing and price is running. So yes, use the calculator for that bit. But nobody tells you the more important thing, which is that your stop belongs to the chart and your position size belongs to your account, and the second you start shrinking your stop because the money feels scary, you've got it backwards. Also the bit about why your short got stopped out when th

"I only lost $50." Okay, but on a $500 account that's 10% of everything you have, and on a $50,000 account you wouldn't have noticed. The dollar amount on its own tells you nothing. What matters is what slice of your account you handed to that trade, and most people work that out afterward instead of before. Let's fix the order you do this in, an The Risk Percentage Calculator works backward from the dollar amount at risk and tells you exactly how much of your account you'

You made 30 pips. How much money is that? No idea. Could be three dollars, could be three hundred. Everyone quotes pips like they mean something on their own, and they don't, they're just distance. What turns them into money is pip value, and it isn't the flat ten dollars a lot everybody repeats. Here's where that number actually comes from, and how to work backwards from it to a position size that fits your risk.

Your platform hands you a box that says 0.01 and explains absolutely nothing about it. So here's what that number is, why moving from 0.01 to 0.10 makes every pip worth ten times more, and how to work out which one you should actually be trading on a $900 account. Plus the thing nobody says out loud: your lot size isn't your risk. Your lot size and your stop loss together are your risk.

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Here’s how to avoid bad trades and choose better ones Using the Currency Strength Meter in your trading. This indicator is ranking relative currency strength over a recent window - usually short-term, intraday. What it means for your trading.