Most retail traders believe that the win rate is the most important metric in trading and it's usually the first thing they look at when searching for a strategy.
That has to do with human psychology as we don't like pain and losses, so we try to avoid that as much as possible. Unfortunately, in trading it's the opposite. You have to embrace losses and keep them as small as possible.
For this reason, the win rate is the most useless metric in trading. The majority of the most successful traders in history have a win rate lower than 50% and some of them like Soros for example even 30%. Nonetheless, they made history for their returns.
Remember, that you can even blow your account with a 90% win rate if you have many small profits but very big losses.
The most important metric is actually the RoMaD (Return over Maximum Drawdown). Your annual returns should be at least double your maximum drawdown for that year. The bigger the better of course.
Think about it as a trade an investor makes on you. If you have a 5% drawdown but a 15% return, that's a 1 to 3 risk to reward ratio. Therefore, you should focus more on minimising your drawdown and losses and maximise your winners.
If you manage to keep a single digit drawdown and have average returns above the S&P 500 in the long run, you won’t have problems finding investors.
