A way of measuring each trade as a multiple of the risk you put on it, where a full stop out is minus 1R.
An R multiple measures every trade as a multiple of the risk you took on it. Risk 100 dollars, make 250, and that trade is +2.5R. Get stopped at your full stop loss and it is minus 1R, every time, whatever the dollar figure says. R turns a messy column of dollar results into one clean scale, so a 50 dollar trade and a 5,000 dollar trade can finally be compared on the only thing that matters, how much you risked to make them.
Divide the result of the trade by the amount you risked on it. Risk 200 dollars and make 600 and that is +3R; lose the full 200 and it is minus 1R.
Your initial risk is the distance from entry to your stop, times position size. Once you fix that as your 1R unit, every outcome reads as a multiple of it. The neat part is that a clean stop out always lands at minus 1R, which hands you a fixed yardstick the dollar column never had.
Because dollars hide your edge behind your position size. A trader who makes 1,000 dollars risking 2,000 did worse than one who made 800 risking 400, and only R shows it at a glance.
R also travels across accounts and time. The same strategy on a 5,000 dollar account and a 500,000 dollar account produces the same R curve, so you can judge the method without account size shouting over it. Dollars tell you how you did, R tells you how good the strategy is. The getting started guide shows how Quantprove detects R in your file.
Never annualize them. There is no square root of 252 scaling for R, and applying it produces fantasy numbers where a real +40R year balloons into something astronomical.
R multiples are not percentage returns and do not compound like them, so report Total R or expectancy per trade, never a fake annualized R figure. This trips up more people than it should, and it is the fastest way to spot someone who does not actually trade their own system.
Quantprove is built around R. It reads your closed trades, detects whether they are already in R or in dollars, and runs your Edge Score on the R scale so position size never distorts the grade.
If you upload dollars, it converts to R where it can. Everything downstream, your expectancy, your drawdown, the score itself, lives on the same risk based scale, which is the only honest way to compare one strategy against another.