Insights · Reference
Trading metrics glossary
Published: · updated · by the QuantGovernor team
Every metric below is a real answer to a real question — and every one of them can be quoted in a way that misleads. Each entry opens with the definition, then says what it leaves out. The second part is the one that matters when you are judging someone else’s track record.
What was earned
Gain
Gain is the percentage change in account value over a period, adjusted for deposits and withdrawals. Without that adjustment, money paid into an account reads as profit.
A gain figure means nothing without its period and its starting capital. “+140%” over four years on a small account and “+140%” over four months on a large one are different claims entirely, and only one of them is usually the one being made.
Profit factor
Profit factor is gross profit divided by gross loss. A profit factor of 2 means two euros earned for every euro lost; below 1 the system loses money.
It is the most honest single number in the list, because it cannot be improved by hiding losses — they are the denominator. What it does not show is how the profit was made: a system that wins constantly in tiny amounts and loses rarely in large ones can post the same profit factor as its opposite.
Win rate
Win rate is the percentage of trades that close in profit. Copy Gold, as of 15 October 2026, wins 74% of its long trades and 73% of its shorts over 845 trades: a figure that alone does not say whether the system makes money.
Taken alone it says almost nothing, and a high one is often a warning. A system can win 95% of its trades and still lose money, if the 5% that lose give back more than the 95% earned — which is the normal signature of a strategy that cuts winners early and lets losers run. Why a high win rate can be misleading works through the arithmetic.
Payoff ratio
Payoff ratio is the average win divided by the average loss. It is the number that makes a win rate readable.
A 40% win rate with a payoff of 3:1 is a profitable system. A 70% win rate with a payoff of 1:3 is not. The two numbers only mean something together, and a provider who quotes one without the other has chosen which one flatters them.
What it cost to earn it
Drawdown
Drawdown is the largest fall from a peak to the following trough, expressed as a percentage. Maximum drawdown is the worst such fall over the account’s whole history: for Copy Gold it is 13.21%, reached in October 2026, which on $5,000 connected is worth about $660.
It answers the only question that matters emotionally: how much was lost, from the best moment, before recovery began. It also hides three things — whether it was measured on balance or equity, how long it lasted, and whether the worst one has already happened. Maximum drawdown is not enough covers what to ask alongside it.
Balance and equity
Balance is the account value counting only closed trades. Equity is the balance plus the current profit or loss of everything still open.
This is the single most useful distinction in the list. A system that never closes a losing trade shows a balance that only rises, while its equity falls — and a drawdown measured on balance will report a reassuring number while the account is deep underwater. When a track record shows two lines, the lower one in a bad moment is the true one.
Equity stop
An equity stop is a declared threshold of equity loss at which every position is closed and the system stops operating. QuantGovernor systems set it at 30%: on $5,000 connected, everything closes at $3,500.
It is a mechanism, not a promise. Execution depends on the market being open and liquid: a weekend gap, a flash move or extreme slippage can push the final loss beyond the declared level before orders fill. What an equity stop is explains the limits. Anyone presenting one as a guarantee is describing something markets do not offer.
Correlation
Correlation, in a portfolio of strategies, is the degree to which two strategies lose money on the same days.
Diversification across systems reduces the number of bad days; it does not make them independent. Several strategies trading the same instrument in the same session will move together on the days that matter most. The useful question to ask of any multi-strategy portfolio is not how many strategies it holds, but what its components’ shared worst days look like. Correlation risk in a multi-strategy portfolio goes through how it is measured.
How risk is built
Leverage
Leverage is the ratio between the open position and the capital required to open it. At 1:500, $1,000 of margin controls $500,000 of gold.
The leverage a broker offers says nothing about risk: it only says how much one could be exposed. Risk is decided by position size relative to the account, and a serious system sizes on capital, not on available leverage. High leverage with small positions is harmless; low leverage used in full is not.
Stop out
A stop out is the forced closing of positions by the broker when available margin falls below a threshold, often 50% of the required margin.
It is not an equity stop: the stop out is decided by the broker to protect itself, and it comes when the account is already nearly wiped out; the equity stop is decided by the strategy and must trigger much earlier. A system that relies on the broker's stop out as its only limit has no limit.
Averaging
Averaging is opening new positions in the same direction while price moves against you, to lower the average entry price.
It works as long as price comes back; when it does not, losses grow faster than in a strategy with a fixed stop per trade, because exposure increases exactly while the market moves against it. It is neither forbidden nor necessarily hidden: it must be declared, with the maximum number of positions and an equity limit below which everything closes. Copy Gold declares it and keeps it under a 30% equity stop: October 2026, at −13.1% mid-month, is exactly the kind of month this technique produces.
Martingale
A martingale is averaging in which each new position is larger than the previous one, often double.
It produces track records with win rates above 90% and a balance that rises every month, until the month it wipes out the account. The signs: very high win rate, very rare but enormous losses, equity drawdown far larger than balance drawdown. The systems published on this site do not use it, and Why a high win rate can be misleading explains how to unmask it.
Grid
A grid is a series of orders placed at fixed price intervals above and below the current level, regardless of market direction.
In a ranging market it collects small profits repeatedly; in a strong trend it accumulates losing positions at every level, and the account reaches stop out before the trend ends. It is the structure behind many “consistent” results that last until gold moves $100 in a day. Without a declared equity stop, a grid is a bet that the market will not move too much.
What happens between the master and your account
Slippage
Slippage is the difference between the price a trade was expected to fill at and the price it actually filled at.
In copy trading it is also the gap between the master’s fill and yours: two separate orders, same instant, different accounts, sometimes different liquidity. It widens exactly when it hurts — at rollover and around scheduled news — and it is structurally larger on gold than on major currency pairs. A published track record shows the master’s result, not yours.
Lot and contract size
A lot is the unit of position size. One standard XAUUSD lot is 100 ounces, so a $1 move in gold is $100 per lot and $1 per 0.01 lot — the smallest size most brokers accept.
It determines the smallest account that can replicate a strategy correctly. Below a certain capital the proportional size falls under 0.01 lots, which does not exist: the platform either rounds up, taking more risk than intended, or skips the trade. How gold copy trading works goes through that arithmetic.
What it costs
High-water mark
The high-water mark is the account's historical peak above which a performance fee is charged: if the account falls and recovers, nothing is owed on the recovery. At 30% on new highs, $5,000 rising to $5,300 pays $90; if it then drops to $5,100 and climbs back to $5,300, nothing is owed on that recovery.
It is the fee structure that aligns the two sides: after a loss, the provider earns nothing until the client is back above the previous peak. A performance fee without a high-water mark charges twice for the same euro — once on the way up, again on the way back after a fall.
Whether to believe any of it
Verified track record
A verified track record is a record of real trades on a real account, published by an independent third party with read-only access, where the account number is public and the figures cannot be edited by the person being judged.
The word “verified” is used loosely. What makes it meaningful is the structure: the data comes from the broker, not from the provider, and anyone can open the page. A screenshot is not a track record, and neither is a results table on the provider’s own site. How to read a Myfxbook track record covers what to check once you have one.
Backtest
A backtest is a simulation of how a strategy would have behaved on historical data.
It is a hypothesis, useful for discarding bad ideas and incapable of proving good ones. It cannot reproduce the spread you would have paid, the slippage you would have suffered, or the fills you would not have received. Backtest vs live trading covers the gap between the two.
Every figure published on this site comes from third-party-verified accounts linked on the strategy pages, including the months we would rather not show. See also the Risk Disclosure. Past performance is not indicative of future results.