Why Repeatability Matters More Than Win Rate
A strategy that works once is not a strategy.
Win rate is one of the most misleading stats in trading.
It’s the number people fixate on first. It’s the number strategies get marketed around. It’s also the number that convinces traders they’re doing fine right up until they aren’t.
A high win rate feels comforting. It creates the illusion of control. But comfort and consistency are not the same thing.
Repeatability is what actually keeps you in the game.
Why win rate gets so much attention
Win rate is easy to understand.
If you win 70 percent of your trades, that sounds good. If you win 80 percent, it sounds even better. It feels like progress. It feels measurable.
The problem is that win rate by itself tells you almost nothing about the durability of a strategy.
You can have a high win rate with:
Small wins and large losses
Tight exits and loose stops
A strategy that only works in one specific environment
And it will look great right up until conditions change.
That’s usually when people say their strategy “stopped working.”
What repeatability actually means
Repeatability has nothing to do with how often you’re right.
It’s about whether the process that produces your trades can be executed the same way over and over again without needing perfect conditions.
A repeatable strategy:
Works across different market regimes, not just one
Has rules you can follow without interpretation
Produces similar behavior even when outcomes vary
The outcomes will always vary. That part is unavoidable.
What matters is whether you can trust the process enough to keep executing it without constantly second-guessing yourself.
The trap of high win rate strategies
Many high win rate strategies are fragile by design.
They rely on:
Tight targets
Mean reversion in calm markets
Conditions where noise is minimal
When those conditions exist, they perform beautifully. When they don’t, losses stack up quickly because the strategy has no room to adapt.
This is where traders get hurt psychologically.
They’ve been conditioned to expect frequent wins. When those wins slow down, they start forcing trades, widening stops, or abandoning rules altogether. Not because the strategy is invalid, but because it was never built to handle variance.
High win rate strategies don’t fail loudly. They fail suddenly.
Why repeatability compounds over time
Repeatability creates something far more valuable than a high win rate.
It creates trust.
When you trust your process, you don’t need every trade to work. You don’t overreact to a small losing streak. You don’t feel the need to constantly tweak things after a bad week.
That trust allows you to:
Size risk appropriately
Stay consistent during drawdowns
Let edges play out over enough samples to matter
Repeatable processes don’t eliminate losses. They make losses survivable.
That’s the difference.
How I think about evaluating repeatability
When I look at a strategy, I care less about how it performed during its best stretch and more about how it behaved during uncomfortable ones.
I ask things like:
Can this be executed the same way during chop and trend?
Does it rely on perfect timing or perfect conditions?
Are the rules clear enough that I’d make the same decision tomorrow?
If the answer to those questions is no, the win rate doesn’t matter.
A strategy that wins less often but behaves consistently is far easier to scale, manage, and stick with than one that looks great until it doesn’t.
Win rate makes for good screenshots. Repeatability makes for long trading careers.
If you find yourself constantly adjusting a strategy to protect a win rate, that’s a warning sign. You’re optimizing for how trades look, not how they behave.
Markets change. Volatility expands and contracts. Trends come and go. A repeatable process gives you something stable to operate from when everything else shifts.
You don’t need to be right most of the time.
You need a process you can execute most of the time without breaking your own rules.
That’s where consistency actually comes from.
*Disclaimer: Not Financial Advice. Investors should conduct thorough research and seek professional advice before making any investment decisions.
This is a really solid reframing, Jamison. Focusing on repeatability over win rate explains why some strategies survive regime changes while others fall apart the moment conditions shift.
Excellent framing on this. The trust angle is understated but huge imo. I had a decent win-rate strategy that completly fell apart in 2022 bc I couldn't handle the variance when it showed up. Rebuilt around repeatabilty instead and its way easier to stick with now even when its not performing perfectly.