Profit factor is gross profit divided by gross loss. Add up everything your winning trades earned, add up everything your losing trades cost (as a positive number), and divide. A profit factor of 1.0 means you broke even — every euro earned matched a euro lost. Above 1.0 you're net profitable. Below 1.0 you're net losing. The metric ignores how often you win and focuses purely on the money-weighted outcome — a single fat winner can carry a lot of small losers, and that's exactly what profit factor captures.
Over 40 trades you earned €8,400 total on winners and lost €3,500 total on losers.
What the bands say: - Below 1.0 — you're losing money. No matter what your win-rate looks like. - 1.0 to 1.3 — barely positive. One commission spike or one bad week and you're underwater. - 1.3 to 1.7 — solid retail edge. Most professional discretionary traders sit here. - 1.7 to 2.5 — strong. Worth scaling carefully. - Above 2.5 — excellent, but small samples can flatter the number. Watch it stay there over 100+ trades before you trust it.
A profit factor above 3 over 30 trades usually means you got lucky on one or two outliers, not that your edge is exceptional.
Profit factor is the metric you bring out when someone asks does your strategy work? Win-rate alone lies — you can win 80% of the time and still lose money if your losers are 5x your winners. Profit factor cuts straight through that: any number above 1.0 is net positive, full stop.
In TradeOnyx your profit factor sits in the Overview tab KPI grid, right next to win-rate — the two together tell the full story your equity curve is summarising. We compute it on every closed trade automatically, no logging, no spreadsheets.
One edge case worth knowing: when you have wins but zero losses in the period (a fresh week, a clean streak), TradeOnyx shows the value as `∞` instead of pretending the math worked. A literal "infinite profit factor" is meaningless and competitor tools quietly print huge numbers — we'd rather show you the truth and let you wait for the first loser to land. Use the Overview period filter to flip between today / week / month / year / all-time and watch how the number stabilises as your sample grows.