Biggest win and biggest loss are the best and worst results on a single trade. Two isolated values that summarise nothing, and yet say more about your discipline than most averages: averages smooth things out, extremes show the day it went off the rails.
What the ratio compares
Contents
These are two single observations over the measured period. They carry no statistical value in the usual sense: they cannot be averaged, they predict nothing, and they move with every new extreme trade. Their usefulness lies elsewhere, in diagnosis.
An average hides what produced it. An average loss of $270 can come from forty losses around $270, or from thirty-nine at $200 and one at $3,000. The first case is a system, the second is a system plus an accident, and only the extremes let you tell them apart.
Anomaly index = biggest loss ÷ average loss
This ratio has no official name, but it is the only genuinely actionable use of these two values.
On a system with a fixed stop and constant size, it should stay near 1.3: the gaps come from slippage and opening gaps.
Above 2, the explanation is almost never the market: it is a stop moved, pulled, or never placed.
| Biggest loss ÷ average loss | What it says |
|---|---|
| up to 1.5 | Normal. Slippage and opening gaps are enough to explain it. |
| 1.5 to 2 | Worth a look. One or two trades went outside the intended frame. |
| 2 to 4 | A stop was widened during the trade. That trade is identifiable in the journal. |
| above 4 | There was no stop. This is the most profitable loss to fix. |
The reading is one division and it points at a specific trade, not a trend. Open it, reread what you noted, and you will almost always find the same story: a position kept "until it comes back". That trade is what needs work, not the whole method.
The biggest win reads the other way round. If it is worth more than four times your average win, the question is not how to reproduce it, it is what size you were carrying that day. The same trade, reversed, would have been the biggest loss of your history.
An index of 7 is not open to debate: there was no stop on that trade. Fixing it requires no method improvement, only placing the stop at entry rather than in your head.
Divide your biggest loss by your average loss. Above 2, a specific trade went outside the frame, and one search in the journal finds it. It is the only use of these values that points at a line rather than a trend.
In this page's example, 7.05: that single trade is worth seven normal losses and carries 16% of all the quarter's losses.
Do the same division on the gains side: biggest win divided by average win. A winner worth five or six times the others almost always signals a larger position than usual.
That trade ended well, but the same size in the other direction would have produced the worst loss in the record. It is a warning, not a model.
The first flaw is reading the absolute value. A biggest loss of $1,480 says nothing on its own; against an average loss of $210, it says a stop was blown.
The second is the gap excuse, both ways. An opening gap really does explain an abnormal loss from time to time; it does not explain an abnormal loss on a position held in the middle of a session.
The third is removing the extreme from the statistics to make them presentable. The accident is part of what the method produces, and hiding it erases precisely the trade that had something to teach.
The classic mistake. Treating your biggest winner as proof of skill. It is often the opposite: a winner far above the rest signals an oversized position, so a risk that would have produced the same excess in the other direction.
| Indicator | Formula | What it measures | When to use it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Biggest loss | the worst trade of the period | The most expensive accident | Finding the stop that was blown |
| Average loss | |Σ losses| ÷ losers | The typical loss | Serving as the reference for diagnosis |
| Maximum drawdown | worst peak → trough | The worst cumulative fall | Measuring a bad run |
| Trades with a stop | trades with a stop ÷ total | Baseline protection | Preventing the accident |
One division a month is enough. Above 2, there is a trade to find; above 4, there was no stop, and it is the most profitable loss to fix.
The story is almost always the same: a position kept while waiting for it to come back. Recognising it once is worth more than reworking the whole method.
A stop placed afterwards or held in your head moves exactly when it would cost. Placed with the entry, it removes the cause of almost every loss worth several times the average.
Yes, and it is immediately fixable. A ratio above 4 means there was no recorded stop on that trade. It is not a strategy problem but an execution one, and it is the fastest loss to fix.
Never from the official statistics, because they are part of what the method produces. Recomputing the same figures without them, however, is an excellent robustness check: if everything collapses, the system was resting on an accident.
Yes, and it is the one case where a high ratio does not accuse your discipline. A stop does not protect against a gap: the market reopens beyond it and the order fills at the first available price. If it happens often, what needs arbitration is holding overnight, not the stop.
By attaching the stop to the entry order, not afterwards. A stop placed later, or held in your head, moves at the exact moment it would cost, that is when price reaches it. That is where almost every loss worth five times the average is born.
Yes, with the same division: biggest win divided by average win. A ratio of five or more almost always signals an oversized position. The trade went well, but the same size in the other direction would have been the worst loss in your record.
In Tradoshi, Biggest win and Biggest loss appear in the Reports screen, next to average win and average loss, which lets you do this page's division without leaving the screen.
The recap that follows an import runs the check on its own: it flags an outlier loss when your worst loss exceeds three times your average loss. And the Trades with a stop loss metric, in Reports, says on what share of your trades the accident was possible.
To go deeper on this: read the full guide. Every term is gathered in the glossary.