Money left on the table is the sum, trade by trade, of what the market offered at its best moment minus what you banked. It is exit efficiency expressed in currency rather than percent, and it is the version that says whether the subject deserves work.
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Money left on the table adds up, for each trade, the gap between its best moment and its result. A trade that offered $400 and returned $150 left $250; a trade exited at the exact peak left nothing.
Its reason for being is scale. An exit efficiency of 44% is identical for a trader leaving $800 a year and for one leaving $80,000, while the first has better things to do and the second should get on it immediately. The percentage points at a lever, the amount says whether to pull it.
It is worth saying plainly what this figure is not: it is not a loss. Money left on the table was never in your account, it was offered at an instant nothing flagged. Reading it as a shortfall is the best way to derail a method that was working.
Money left = Σ max(0 ; trade MFE − gain banked)
The max(0; …) is not a stylistic precaution: without it, a trade exited at the peak would give a negative value offsetting another trade, and the total would describe nothing.
That is precisely what makes it always positive, so always alarming in appearance. A perfect trader would still leave money on the table on every trade whose peak came after their target.
The figure grows mechanically with trade count. It compares between two periods only at comparable activity, or related to total gain.
| Money left against gain banked | What it describes |
|---|---|
| under 30% | Tight exits. The lever exists but it is small, and other jobs pay more. |
| 30 to 80% | Ordinary. Part of the move regularly leaves without you. |
| 80 to 150% | The market offered as much as you took. The exit is the first job. |
| over 200% | Very early exits, or one huge trade crushing the total. Check which. |
The last row contains the check to run before any conclusion. This total is a sum, so one trade with an enormous MFE can represent half the quarter's figure. Removing the biggest contributor and looking at what remains is the same reflex as removing your biggest winner from a profit factor, and it avoids rebuilding a method because of one isolated case.
The rest of the table reads as a proportion of the gain, never in absolute value. A trader earning $100,000 and leaving $30,000 does not have the same problem as one earning $3,000 and leaving $30,000, while the second amount is identical.
The market offered $13,920 more than was taken, that is more than the gain itself. That amount is not a loss, and it will never be fully recoverable: some of those peaks were untouchable without perfect luck. But the order of magnitude says working on the exit is worth more, here, than looking for extra trades.
This is the use this figure exists for. Exit efficiency says a lever exists, money left says how much it weighs. Between working on an exit that leaves $900 a year and finding ten more trades a month, the amount settles it in a second.
It is an arbitrage of time, not of method. Many traders spend months on a real but tiny lever while a bigger one waits unexamined.
Split by configuration, this amount almost always points at one or two setups responsible for most of it. They are often the ones producing the longest moves, so the ones where a fixed target is most expensive.
That breakdown is more useful than the total, because it leads to a precise action: change the exit on one setup, not on the whole method.
The central flaw is the structural bias. Since negative values are floored at zero, this total can only grow, and a perfectly disciplined trader will still show an impressive figure. Reading it as a reproach misreads the very construction of the measure.
The second is taking it for recoverable money. Some of those peaks were spikes of a few seconds no order would have been filled on, and another part would only have occurred had you not exited, which would have changed how you managed the next trade. It is not a reserve to go and fetch.
The third is the size effect. A figure in currency grows with trade count and with position size, so it does not compare from quarter to quarter if activity changed. It is the ratio to the gain banked that compares, not the raw amount.
The classic mistake. Reading it as a shortfall. That money was never in your account, and part of those peaks were spikes of a few seconds no order would have caught. Treating this figure as a loss pushes you to hold positions beyond what the method planned, which costs far more than what it claims to recover.
| Indicator | Formula | What it measures | When to use it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Money left on the table | Σ max(0; MFE − gain) | The gap, in currency | Knowing whether the lever is worth the work |
| Exit efficiency | Σ gains ÷ Σ MFE | The same gap, in % | Tracking the habit over time |
| MFE | best point − entry | What was offered, per trade | Understanding a particular case |
| Average win | mean of winners | The result, without the path | Saying what a winner returns |
$13,920 means nothing on its own. Against $11,040 of gains, it means the market offered more than was taken, and there the figure speaks. The raw amount compares neither with another trader nor with your own previous quarter.
It is a sum, so one exceptional trade can be half of it. The same check as on profit factor: without it, what remains? If the total collapses, there was no exit problem, there was an outlier trade.
The total rarely points at an action. The breakdown almost always does: one or two setups carry most of it, and those are the ones whose exit needs changing, not the whole method.
It is the sum, per trade, of what the market offered at its best moment minus what you actually banked. A trade that offered $400 and returned $150 left $250 on the table.
Because negative gaps are floored at zero: a trade exited at the exact peak leaves zero, never a negative value offsetting another trade. That is intended, otherwise the total would describe nothing, but it means it always grows, even for an excellent trader.
No, and that is the most expensive confusion about this term. That money was never in your account: it was offered at an instant nothing flagged as the peak. Some of those spikes would have filled no order. Reading it as a loss pushes you to hold positions longer than planned, which costs more.
By relating it to your gain banked over the same period. Leaving 30% of what you took is ordinary; leaving more than 100% means the market offered more than you kept, and there the exit becomes the first job. The raw amount compares to nothing.
Yes, completely, because it is a sum. One trade with an enormous MFE can be half a quarter's figure. The check is the same as on profit factor: remove the biggest contributor and look at what remains before concluding anything about your exits.
Money left on the table is a metric in the Reports screen, in the same group as MFE and exit efficiency. Like them, it only exists for trades whose historical candles Tradoshi could download, since it is computed from MFE.
Both checks described above happen in that screen with nothing computed by hand. The Tag dimension breaks the amount down per setup and points at the one carrying most of it. And the Biggest win metric, displayed alongside, says straight away whether one exceptional trade explains the total on its own.
To go deeper on this: read the full guide. Every term is gathered in the glossary.