R-multiple
R-multiple — A trade result expressed as a multiple of the money you planned to risk on it — a +2R trade made twice what you were prepared to lose.
R-multiples are the single most useful change you can make to how you record trades, and they are the one thing a broker statement genuinely cannot give you. R comes from your intent, and intent is not in the file.
In plain English
Before a trade, you decide how much you are willing to lose on it. Call that 1R. Afterwards, divide the actual result by that amount. Risk $200, make $500, and the trade was +2.5R. Risk $200, lose $200, and it was −1R. Risk $200, lose $340 because you widened the stop, and it was −1.7R — and that last case is the reason R is worth the effort.
The point is comparability. A $500 win on a 0.1-lot trade and a $500 win on a 1.0-lot trade are the same number in currency and completely different achievements. In R they are 5R and 0.5R, and the ranking is finally honest.
Once every trade has an R value, everything downstream becomes comparable: expectancy in R, average win in R, your worst loss in R. Most professional review is done in R for exactly this reason, and a trading record kept in R survives changing account size, changing instruments, and changing position sizing without needing to be re-based.
The formula
R-multiple = net result of the trade ÷ planned risk on that trade
- Planned risk is what you decided to lose before entering — position size × stop distance, in account currency.
- Net result is after commission and swap.
- A trade closed at your stop is −1R by definition. Anything worse than −1R is a stop that was not honoured.
Planned risk is not the stop-loss on the statement. See below — this distinction is the whole page.
Worked example — the demo account
Ticket #900087 on the demo account: GBPUSD short, 0.71 lots, opened at 1.28418 and closed at 1.27383.
| Gross profit | +$734.85 | |
|---|---|---|
| Commission | −$4.26 | |
| Net result | +$730.59 | |
| Planned risk entered in the journal | $200.00 | |
| R-multiple | +3.65R | 730.59 ÷ 200 |
A +3.65R trade — it returned three and a half times what was put at risk.
Change nothing about the trade and enter a planned risk of $500 instead, and the same trade becomes +1.02R. Neither number is wrong; they describe two different bets that happened to have the same outcome. That is the entire idea.
TapeSheet recomputes the R column live as you type the planned risk, so you can see immediately what a trade was worth relative to what you were actually risking.
Every figure above is from the demo account TapeSheet ships with — 96 closed trades, generated from a fixed seed. Open the same account →
What this does not tell you
The caveat is the part worth reading. Most tools put it in a footer, if they print it at all.
- Your statement does not contain your planned risk, and no tool can infer it. The S/L column in an MT4 or MT5 statement is the last value the stop was set to, not the value it had at entry. If you moved it — which is exactly the habit worth catching — the file records the move and forgets the original. Any product that shows you R-multiples straight from an uploaded statement is guessing, and the guess flatters you: it silently treats a widened stop as if it had been the plan.
- R says nothing about whether the risk was sensible. A +3R trade where 1R was 25% of the account is a disaster that happened to pay. R normalises to your intent; it does not audit your intent.
- Average R is still an average. An expectancy of +0.3R over 30 trades and over 500 trades mean very different things, and R does not encode sample size.
- Losses worse than −1R are the signal, not the noise. If your record contains −1.7R and −2.4R trades, your stops are not being honoured, and no amount of positive expectancy elsewhere makes that safe. Sorting by R and reading the bottom is the most useful five minutes in a review.
Where TapeSheet shows it
Enter “Planned risk” in a trade’s journal panel and the R-multiple appears immediately, plus an R column in the Trades table you can sort by. It is deliberately manual: it is the one figure that has to come from you, because it is the only one that was never in the file.
Questions
Why can’t TapeSheet work out my R-multiples automatically?
Because the information is not in the statement. MT4 and MT5 export the current stop-loss value at the time the trade closed, not the one it was opened with. For a trade whose stop was never moved those coincide; for a trade whose stop was widened they do not, and that is precisely the trade you most need to measure honestly. Rather than guess, TapeSheet asks you for the number once and then does all the arithmetic.
Related terms
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