A streak is a chronological run of trades where every trade has the same sign — all winners, or all losers. TradeOnyx walks your trade list in time order, counts consecutive winners until a loser breaks the run, then resets. Same for losers. Two summary numbers fall out: longest winning streak (the most consecutive wins you've ever had) and longest losing streak (the most consecutive losses).
Streaks are a survival metric, not a quality metric. They tell you what your equity curve actually felt like at its hottest peak and its coldest pit, not what the average trade looked like.
Twelve trades in chronological order: W W W L W W L L L W W W. Walk through and reset on every sign change.
How to read your streak numbers honestly: - Long winning streak (8+) is the most psychologically dangerous moment in trading. Overconfidence creeps in. Position sizes drift up. Plan deviations get reframed as "I see something". Most blow-up traces back to a position taken at the end of a hot streak, sized 3× the usual. - Long losing streak (5+) is the discipline test. The trader who never has a 4+ losing streak is either lucky, taking too few trades, or quietly moving stops to "save" trades that should have closed losers. If your max loss streak is 2 over hundreds of trades, audit your stop-loss column. - Streaks scale with trade count. A 100-trade history with max-loss-streak 5 is unremarkable. A 1,000-trade history with max-loss-streak 5 is suspicious — statistically, a 50%-win-rate strategy expects an 8-9 streak somewhere in 1,000 trades. Streaks shorter than expectation = stops are slipping or trades aren't independent. - Pair winning + losing streak. A trader with a 12-win streak and a 10-loss streak has high variance. A trader with 4-win and 4-loss has low variance. Variance tells you what the equity curve felt like; the average tells you what it added up to.
TradeOnyx shows the longest winning streak and longest losing streak as two separate KPI tiles in the Overview. They sit visually together so the variance picture reads at a glance. Switch the period filter to compare windows — a 90-day max-loss-streak of 8 versus a 30-day max-loss-streak of 2 tells you the recent shrinkage is real, not noise.
The most useful pairing is with the Streak Warning notification (TRA-100): when you've just closed three losing trades in a row, an inbox row fires. That's your early-warning, the moment before the long losing streak becomes a longer losing streak. The notification fires once per UTC day so a fourth loser the same day doesn't add noise; the next streak resets fresh tomorrow.
For the post-hot-streak risk: combine the Trades-tab filter "trades on day after a 5+ winning streak" with the per-trade R column. The discipline cost of a winning streak is usually visible there — those trades have unusually large position sizes and unusually negative R distributions. TradeOnyx makes the audit a 10-second filter, not a spreadsheet exercise.