Why a Successful Trade Can Still Have Poor Risk-to-Reward

Suppose I risk $200 to make $50 on a trade.

The trade wins, but that doesn't automatically make the decision attractive.

If I repeatedly risk much more than I expect to gain, I may need an unusually high win rate just to cover losses and costs.

The key is to evaluate the strategy across a sample of trades, including average wins, average losses, and execution expenses.

One profitable trade tells me what happened once. It doesn't establish whether the strategy has positive expectancy.