A win rate above eighty percent should raise eyebrows

[Fairman]

A win rate above eighty percent should raise eyebrows

A system that wins 85 percent of the time sounds like a dream. In scalping, it is often a warning.

High win rates can come from a structure with small targets and large stops. The trader wins often but loses big when it goes wrong. The expectancy may be negative even if the hit rate is spectacular.

Another source is data. A backtest with unrealistic fills, ignoring spread, or ambiguous bar order can produce inflated win rates that vanish in live trading.

Martingale and grid methods also create high win rates, hiding the tail risk until a single sequence erases the account.

The right question is not how often the strategy wins, but how much it makes on average per trade after costs, how deep the worst drawdown has been, and how the results look under realistic conditions.

A lower win rate with a good reward to risk ratio is often sturdier than a high one that depends on rare large losses not occurring.

Another red flag is a curve that rises in a perfectly straight line. Real strategies have texture. A smooth line suggests either an averaging-down method or a curve fitted to the past.

What is the average win versus the average loss behind the favourite strategy's win rate?