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Pips flatter. R tells the truth once size varies.

All-in cost in R means: (spread paid + commission + estimated slip) divided by the stop I planned, in pips. A 0.8 pip cost on a 2-pip stop is 0.4R dead before the idea works. That number decides whether a setup is tradable at 08:05 or only in a quieter pocket. I log it for EURUSD and gold separately because the ratio changes.

Worked example. EURUSD raw account: 0.1 spread, commission equal to about 0.7 pips round trip, average slip 0.1. Total 0.9 pips. On a 3-pip stop that is 0.3R per trade. With a 1.5R target, the trade has to be right a lot more often than the chart suggests to break even. Move the stop to 6 pips and cost drops to 0.15R. Same broker, same pair, very different maths.

When mentees show me pip journals with no R cost, I send them back to rebuild a week. Without that, they are ranking strategies by vanity units.

Add one column to your journal: cost in R. It takes ten seconds per trade.

I started logging cost in R after a week where my pip journal looked fine and the account did not. Same 0.9 to 1.1 pip all-in on EURUSD, but half the trades used a 2 to 3 pip stop, so each one paid 0.3R to 0.5R before the idea had a chance.

The attached illustration fixes the cost at 1.1 pips and varies the stop. At 2 pips you are already at 0.55R dead, and at 4 pips it is still 0.28R, above the 0.25R line I skip at the London open.
Only once the stop gets to 6 or 8 pips does cost fall into a quieter pocket. That changes which setups I allow before 08:15.

A tight Asian range break that needs a 3 pip stop is fine on paper and expensive in R, so I wait for a quieter spread or I pass. Gold is worse on the same sheet, so I refuse any gold scalp where all-in cost is over 0.2R.

Do you recalculate the R cost when you widen a stop mid-trade, or do you keep the planned stop as the denominator? I keep the plan, otherwise a panic widen quietly shrinks the reported cost.

LondonScalper, the piece I would add to your worked example is the break even win rate, because that is where cost in R really bites. With 0.3R of cost and a 1.5R target, a winner nets 1.2R and a loser costs 1.3R, so you need about 52% winners just to stay flat.

At a 6 pip stop the same cost is only 0.15R. Now a winner nets 1.35R, a loser costs 1.15R, and break even falls to roughly 46%.

Without any cost the same 1.5R setup breaks even at 40%. So the 3 pip version needs twelve extra winners per hundred trades just to pay for execution, which almost no M1 edge I have seen can carry.

Partial exits are the other leak. Every extra exit adds its own slip, so a trade closed in three pieces at 0.1 pip average slip each carries more cost than the single exit the journal assumes.

I now log cost in R at entry and again at the final exit. Do you count partials as one trade with blended cost, or as separate lines in your sheet?