Risk:Reward Visualiser
Enter your entry, stop loss, and take profit to visualise your risk-to-reward ratio instantly.
What is Risk:Reward Ratio?
The risk-to-reward ratio (R:R) compares how much you stand to lose on a trade versus how much you could gain. A 1:2 ratio means your potential profit is twice your potential loss.
Professional traders aim for at least 1:2 R:R, meaning they only need a 33% win rate to break even. This calculator helps you evaluate every trade setup before entering.
Common questions
What is a good risk-reward ratio?
There is no universally good ratio — only ratios that pair with a win rate. 1:1 needs better than 50% wins to make money, 1:2 needs better than 33%, and 1:3 needs better than 25%. A 1:5 setup with a 15% hit rate loses money; a 1:1 setup at 60% makes it.
What win rate do I need to break even at 1:2?
33.3%. The break-even win rate is 1 / (1 + R), where R is the reward multiple. That figure is before costs — add spread, commission and swap and the real requirement is a few points higher.
Does a higher risk-reward ratio always mean more profit?
No, and this is the most common mistake in the ratio. Pushing a target further out lowers the probability of reaching it. Expectancy is win rate times reward minus loss rate times risk, and stretching the target usually moves both terms in opposite directions.
Should the ratio be measured before or after costs?
After. A 1:2 trade with a 20-pip stop and a 1.5-pip round-trip cost really risks 21.5 pips to make 38.5, which is 1:1.8. On short-horizon strategies this is the difference between a published edge and a losing system, and it is a pattern that shows up repeatedly in the strategies tested on this site.
Where we use this
A good risk:reward ratio alone is not an edge. 13 of the 16 strategies we tested failed after real costs.
We test strategies the hard way and publish every result. Get an email when one passes our gates.