Subtle & customizable audible cues to indicate when charts turnover, plus world clocks for any market — by & for professional traders
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Subtle & customizable audible cues to indicate when charts turnover, plus world clocks for any market — by & for professional traders
Open the appGuidance last reviewed 2026-08-19
Almost every trading statistic judges a trade by where it finished. MAE and MFE judge it by where it went — and that turns out to be where the useful information about your exits lives.
A trade that closed at +0.4R after touching +2.6R and dipping to −0.7R has a story. Its result says +0.4R and nothing else.
| What they measure | How far a trade traveled, not where it ended |
| Reading MAE | Whether your stops are wider or tighter than needed |
| Reading MFE | Whether you are leaving the move on the table |
| Efficiency | What share of the available move you kept |
| The traps | Hindsight, survivorship, and intrabar data |
Both are measured from your entry, while the position is open, and both are usually best expressed in R so trades of different sizes can sit in the same analysis.
For a long entered at 50.00 with a 1.50 stop — so R is 1.50 per share:
| Event | Price | In R |
|---|---|---|
| Entry | 50.00 | 0 |
| Dipped to | 49.10 | MAE = −0.6R |
| Ran to | 53.60 | MFE = +2.4R |
| Exited at | 51.20 | Result = +0.8R |
That trade never came close to the stop, offered 2.4R, and delivered 0.8R. Three different facts, and only the last one appears in a normal report.
⚠️ MAE is measured to the worst point, not to the stop. A trade that never went against you has an MAE near zero — which is real information, and it is exactly what tells you a stop was never tested.
Plot MAE against outcome for every trade — winners in one group, losers in another. The question is: how far did the eventual winners go against me before working?
If winners rarely exceed 0.5R of adverse excursion and your stop sits at 1R, you are paying for room you never use. A tighter stop would cut almost none of the winners and would make every loser cheaper — which raises expectancy without touching your entries at all.
If winners routinely dip to 0.8R or 0.9R first, your stop is close to the edge. Tightening it would have converted winners into losses, and the wider stop is doing real work.
⭐ This is the closest thing in trading analytics to a free improvement, because it changes the cost of being wrong without requiring you to be right more often.
⚠️ Do not tighten to the observed maximum. If the worst MAE among your winners was 0.85R, a stop at 0.85R would have kept every winner in your history and will not keep the next one. Sampling error cuts both ways — see how many trades before the numbers mean anything.
Same idea, other direction. How far did trades go in my favor, and how much of it did I keep?
Two patterns come up repeatedly:
Large MFE, small result. Trades reaching +2R and closing at +0.6R. The entries are finding real moves and the exit rule is giving them back. That is a specific, fixable diagnosis — a rule to change — rather than the vague "let winners run" that gets repeated at people.
Small MFE across the board. Trades barely move before stalling. The exits are not the problem; the entries are late, or the instrument does not travel far enough for the stop you are using.
⚠️ MFE on LOSING trades is the one to check first. If losers routinely show +1R of favorable excursion before turning into −1R losses, you are watching profits become losses — usually the most emotionally expensive pattern in a record, and one that a simple break-even rule may address.
Combine them and you get a measure of how well you traded the move you actually caught.
Exit efficiency = result ÷ MFE
A trade that made +0.8R out of an available +2.4R has an efficiency of about 33%. Averaged across a record, it tells you how much of what you found you kept.
⚠️ 100% efficiency is not the target and is not achievable. Reaching it means every exit was the high tick, which happens by luck. A stable figure somewhere in the middle, improving slowly, is what progress looks like.
⭐ Track the trend, not the level. The absolute number depends heavily on style — a trend follower will show low efficiency by design, because catching a fraction of a large move is the whole model.
🔴 Hindsight. MFE is only knowable after the fact. "I could have made 2.4R" is true and useless — at the time, +2.4R and +0.6R looked identical. MAE and MFE describe distributions to design rules against; they do not grade individual trades. Reviewing one trade and concluding you should have exited at the high is the fastest way to make this analysis harmful.
🔴 Survivorship. Analyzing MAE on winners only tells you where winners went and nothing about the losers a tighter stop would also have caught. Both groups, always.
⚠️ Intrabar data. Exact MAE and MFE need to know the path within each bar. A journal working from daily bars or from your fills alone can only approximate — fine for spotting a pattern, not fine for setting a threshold to two decimal places.
⚠️ Gaps. A trade that gapped past your stop has an MAE beyond −1R that no stop placement would have prevented. Those belong in the record and not in the stop-placement analysis.
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| MAE | The worst point a trade reached while open |
| MFE | The best point a trade reached while open |
| Excursion | Movement from entry, while the position is open |
| R | The money risked — entry to stop |
| Exit efficiency | Result divided by MFE |
| Intrabar | Price movement within a single bar |
| Survivorship | Drawing conclusions from only the surviving cases |
MAE and MFE are the exit metrics. Nearly everything else — win rate, profit factor, expectancy — measures results without saying where they came from.
They pair naturally with R-multiples, which supply the unit, and with drawdown, which measures the account rather than the trade.
MAE and MFE calculations depend on the price data available to your platform, and figures from tools using different data are not directly comparable.
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