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For years I tracked results in pips and money. Then I switched to R: result divided by the planned risk.

What became visible:

• My trades on GBPJPY looked great in pips, but in R they were average, because the stops were also larger.
• Small winners I closed early looked fine in pips, but in R they showed I was cutting at 0.4R regularly.
• My best setup by R wasn't my best by pips.

R makes trades with different stops comparable. Since switching, my decisions about which setups to keep are much clearer.

Anyone still tracking only pips? I'd be curious why.

The early exits were the thing that hit me hardest when I made the same switch. In pips my winners looked respectable, but once everything was in R the median winner on my London breakouts was 0.6R against a planned 1.5R. I had been reading a decent pip total as proof the exits were fine, when really I was leaving most of the planned reward on the table.

One extra step helped me a lot. I log the planned R at entry as well as the result, so I can see the gap between what the setup offered and what I actually took. On my worst month the average gap was close to a full R per winning trade, which was a fairly blunt message.

The only place I still look at pips is costs. Spread and commission are fixed in pips, so a setup with tight stops can look great in R and still lose a big share of each trade to costs. I keep a column for cost as a fraction of R and drop anything where that figure creeps above about 0.15.