I was asked to take 100 trades with the MACD strategy, but this time, instead of opening multiple trades at the same time, I should take one trade at a time to see what happens to the win rate.
In the previous test we have done, the MACD win rate hovered around the 60% mark in good market conditions.
But when I test trades, I usually take multiple trades at the same time, such as taking the next trade before the previous one has reached its profit or loss target.
But what will happen if I wait for the previous trade to reach its profit or stop-loss first?

Will the win rate go up or down?
Well, I took 100 trades to find out.
If you have not heard about the MACD strategy that got a high win rate in a trending market, I recently made a testing video on it and explained everything about it.
You can check that video to learn more about it, and the rules I used to test it.
In this video, I mainly want to focus on what will happen to the win rate. Will it change dramatically or will it stay pretty much the same.
It’s a really good question, you see.
In the live market, I usually don’t open multiple trades that are basically the same.
I prefer taking one similar trade at a time so my risk is low in the same entry direction.
I like to diversify things.
But when I started this channel and the 100-times testing series, I decided not to take one trade at a time in the testing videos.
Well, the reason was that it just didn’t make much difference.
It’s like every trade is unique.
While testing, even if multiple trades appear nearby and we end up taking multiple running trades, they are still separate.
It’s like two setups that were going to appear a few days from each other happened to appear nearby each other.
It’s like a coin toss; every time you flip that coin, the result is unique and not related to the previous trade.
If you flip a coin two times in a few minutes, or two times over a span of a few days, the win rate of the coin toss is still going to remain the same 50%.

But you might say the market is not a coin toss because the market structure is different after a few days.
Then, you are absolutely correct. But because the market is not a coin toss, the win rate is not going to be the same in every market structure.
From previous testing videos, we know that the MACD’s win rate is around the 60% mark in a good market, and it completely sucks and gives around a low 30% win rate in a bad market.
So, as long as the market conditions are good and there is a nice trend going on, the MACD has a higher probability of giving a win rate that is around the 60% mark.
If you wait for the previous running trade to reach its profit or loss target and only take one trade at a time, then you might end up taking trades in a completely different market structure.
In that scenario, yes, your win rate can differ between taking one trade at a time versus taking multiple trades at a time.
While testing strategies, since we specifically test in good or bad market conditions, we can expect both trading styles to give pretty much the same win rate.
In this testing video, when I only took one trade at a time, the profit graph still went in an upward direction pretty nicely, just like it did last time when I took multiple trades at the same time.

At the end, it got a 57% win rate, which is around the 60% mark it has gotten in other testing videos.
If I remember correctly, in the last five years, when we tested the MACD in different good market conditions, it gave win rates between 57% and 62%.

Some of you in the comment section and Patreon supporters have shared getting win rates as high as 65%.
All of this is with a 1.5 to 1 reward-to-risk ratio.
Crazy high win rates like 65% and above are really rare and only appear in a really trending market in the short term.
Near the start of this channel, I made a testing video where we found that the win rate of a strategy we get using a 100-times test can easily vary around 5% up and 5% down.

It’s like a bell curve. The win rate of the MACD in a good market moves around the 60% mark.

Higher win rates are extremely rare, and getting a lower win rate in an extremely good market is also extremely rare.
In bad market conditions, and by that, I mean where the price is not trending for a trend strategy, the win rate can easily go low to around 30% to 35%.
An extremely low win rate, such as 10%, is rare, and getting a high win rate in a bad market is also rare.
If you are still in the learning stage and struggle to identify good and bad markets, or just blindly take all trades with this or any other strategy without filtering, your win rate will probably fall somewhere around the breakeven point.
In the last video, we learned that identifying good and bad movement is not easy in the live market.
It looks much easier in the past market with hindsight.
So, it can be difficult to get a high win rate, especially when we have just started learning, and all market conditions look pretty much the same to us.

But to answer the question of whether taking one trade at a time gets a dramatically different win rate than taking multiple similar trades at the same time, the answer is no.
As long as the market conditions are the same, the win rate will probably stay the same.
It can’t be exactly the same as last time, because a fixed win rate doesn’t exist in trading.
So, you will probably see some kind of difference in the win rate, but overall, the number of running trades doesn’t matter when it comes to win rate. The market condition does.
Still, we shouldn’t take multiple trades at the same time in the same direction for risk management reasons.
If you have 10 trades running in the same direction at the same time with 1% risk each, then your risk is actually 10% in that direction.
That is not proper money management.
So, it is better to think of taking multiple trades from a risk perspective.

I remember this conversation I had with a patreon supporter a few years back where he was discussing taking many trades at the same time with 0.1% risk of the account so he could trade quantity.
This way, even if he gets a lower win rate that is just above the breakeven point, he will still make a decent amount of money because of the quantity.
With a 0.1% risk on each trade, if you take 10 trades at the same time that are very similar to each other, the total risk in that direction is still 1% of the account.
That is much safer and fits with popular money management rules.
That’s all! Thanks for watching.