You keep asking “how much did I make?” I want you asking “how many R?”
R is one unit of risk — the distance from your entry to your stop, multiplied by your position size. It is the amount you decided, in advance, to lose if the trade is wrong. Every result is then measured in multiples of that one unit. Risk $100 to make $250 and you made +2.5R. Get stopped and you lost −1R. The dollar amount changes with your account and your size; the R does not.
Take your entry price and your stop price — the gap between them is your risk per share or per contract. Multiply by how many you hold and you have 1R in dollars. Your exit, minus your entry, divided by that per-unit risk, is your result in R. You never have to do this by hand here: the moment you log an entry and a stop, the journal fixes 1R and scores every exit against it automatically.
Dollars swing with your size and your mood; a $500 win feels huge on a small account and trivial on a large one. R holds still. A +2R day is a +2R day whether you risked $50 or $5,000 — so you can finally compare today to last Tuesday, this instrument to that one, this month to last, and have the comparison actually mean something. R is what makes a trading record a dataset instead of a diary.
Reading about R is the easy part. The journal makes you keep the stats — grade the setup before you know how it ends, and hear the one thing to fix next.
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