Profit Factor
Profit factor is calculated as gross profit divided by gross loss over a set of trades: add up every winning trade's profit, add up every losing trade's loss (as a positive number), and divide the first by the second. A profit factor above 1.0 means the trades made more in total than they lost; below 1.0 means the opposite, regardless of how many trades won or lost.
Because it's a ratio of totals, profit factor treats one large winner the same as many small winners that add up to the same sum — it says nothing on its own about how often trades win or how large any single trade was.
Why it matters
Profit factor is a fast way to see whether a strategy's wins are outweighing its losses in dollar terms, which is a different question from how often it wins. A strategy can have a low win rate and still post a strong profit factor if its average winner is large relative to its average loser — and the reverse is also true, which is why profit factor and win rate need to be read together, not as substitutes for each other.
The honest caveat: profit factor computed over a small number of trades can swing wildly on a single outsized win or loss, so a strong profit factor over 8 trades carries far less information than the same number over 200 trades.
In MimikTrader
Profit factor is one of the KPIs on the Pro plan analytics dashboard, computed from a connected account's actual broker fills.
Example
Example: over 20 trades, the winners total $3,000 in gross profit and the losers total $1,000 in gross loss. Profit factor = $3,000 ÷ $1,000 = 3.0 — for every dollar lost, three dollars were made. That number alone doesn't say whether it came from 15 small wins and 5 losses, or 2 large wins covering 18 small losses; win rate and expectancy fill in that picture.
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