We lowered our own win rate from 68% to 60%

Our track record used to say 68% of resolved signals were wins. It now says 60%.

Nobody made us change it. We changed it because the old number was measuring the wrong thing, and we would rather publish a smaller number that is true than a larger one that is not.

Here is the whole reasoning, with the data.

What the number actually measured

Every signal we publish carries an entry, a stop, and three targets — TP1, TP2, TP3. Those targets are not arbitrary. The strategy trades range breakouts, so the levels come from the range itself:

• TP1 sits at 78.6% of the range — still inside it
• TP2 is the top of the range — the breakout's actual objective
• TP3 is an extension beyond the range
• The stop sits at the range base

Until now we scored the track record at TP1. A signal that touched TP1 before its stop was a win, and that is where we booked it.

The problem is arithmetic. Because the stop sits all the way at the range base while TP1 sits inside the range, the median signal risked 1 to make 0.25. You can win most of the time on those terms and still go backwards — and that is exactly what the data showed.

What 167 resolved signals said

We pulled every resolved signal and scored it three ways: exit at TP1, exit at TP2, exit at TP3. One rule applied identically to every signal, no picking the best exit per trade.

R is the risk on the trade: +1R means you made what you were risking, −1R means you lost it.

The ordering held in every slice we cut that had enough signals to order — long and short, daily and weekly, and the most recent month on its own.

So booking at TP1 was not a neutral reporting choice. It was the worst of the three, and it was the one on our website.

What we changed

The exit rule is now TP2, and we picked it on structural grounds rather than because of the table above.

The strategy is a range breakout. TP1 is inside the range, so booking there means closing before the breakout has actually done anything. TP3 requires the move to exceed the structure that produced the signal — and only 28% of resolved signals ever got there, so publishing it as our yardstick would describe a system most of our signals do not participate in.

TP2 is the top of the range. It is the thing the setup is for. That it also happens to score better is corroboration, not the reason — and we want to be explicit about that, because "pick whichever number looks best" is exactly how track records become fiction.

Why the win rate fell

A win rate has to mean the same thing as the result next to it. Under the old rule, "win" meant TP1 was touched before the stop. If we keep that definition while scoring at TP2, the page ends up with rows marked win sitting next to a loss — which is not a rounding problem, it is a contradiction.

So the definition follows the rule: a win is now TP2 reached before the stop.

Same signals. Same outcomes. Nothing was deleted, nothing was re-run, no losing trade quietly disappeared. One consistent rule, applied to every signal in the history, and the number it produces is 60%.

What we are not doing

We are not going to change this again because a different rule would look better next quarter. The exit rule is now part of the published methodology, and if it ever changes again it will be for a structural reason, stated here, with the numbers before and after.

We also are not telling you when to exit. We publish the entry, the stop and all three targets — how you manage a position is yours. What we owe you is a precise statement of how our own scoreboard is calculated, and that is what this is.

A consistent rule still has losers. We keep them visible, because a track record that only shows winners is not a track record.

One more thing, since we are being thorough

The same analysis turned up something we are not acting on yet: our long signals make money and our short signals do not. That held even in a falling market, which kills the easy excuse.

We are not quarantining shorts on it. Two months is long enough to measure a market regime and not long enough to measure an edge, and acting on the first while believing it is the second is how people fool themselves. We are collecting the data that will actually answer it, and we will publish that answer whichever way it comes out.

You can see every signal, open and resolved, on the track record.

⚠️ Not financial advice.