Know where every open trade stands, in R.

The problem: a P&L number tells you nothing about the trade

"Up $340" sounds good, until you realise you risked $600 on it. Money hides the only question that matters: how is this trade doing against the risk I took?

That is why I measure everything in R. One R is the distance from entry to the stop. A trade at +1R has made what it risked. A trade at −0.5R is halfway to the stop. It reads the same on a $1,000 account and a $1,000,000 one.

What the Desk shows on every open trade

At the 5 Oct close KSS was $19.53: (19.53 − 18.00) ÷ (18.00 − 16.83) = +1.31R, with $0.82 left to the $20.35 target. It hit the target two sessions later.

1. Live R from the original stop. If I move the stop to break-even, the R still counts from where the risk really was, so a winner never looks smaller than it is.
2. Distance to target. In price and as a bar, so you can see at a glance which trades are nearly done.
3. The same on every tab. Swing, Forex and Squeeze all read the same way, so there is nothing new to learn per market.

Why it makes you a calmer trader

Most bad exits come from staring at money. A trade at +0.4R that dips to +0.1R feels like a loss, so people close it, and then it runs to +2R without them. When you see the trade in R next to its target, you see it for what it is: a normal wobble inside a plan.

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