pertrade

Pertrade is a metric used in trading analytics to quantify the average financial result of each executed trade. It is commonly used by quantitative traders, brokers, and portfolio managers to summarize performance on a per-trade basis. Pertrade can be reported as gross profit per trade or net profit per trade after costs such as commissions, slippage, and fees.

Calculation and variants. The basic net per-trade value is calculated as total net profit from trades divided by the number of trades performed. If costs are included, the formula uses net profit after commissions and fees. A related variant is cost per trade, which measures total trading costs divided by the number of trades. Some analyses report gross per-trade profit, excluding trading costs, to reflect the strategy’s raw profitability.

Applications. Pertrade is used to compare trading strategies, instruments, or trading platforms on a per-trade basis. It helps set profitability targets, calibrate risk management, and evaluate performance during backtesting and live trading. In portfolio dashboards, pertrade provides a concise snapshot of efficiency and helps identify strategies that require too many trades to achieve meaningful gains.

Limitations. Pertrade is sensitive to sample size and market regime. High-frequency strategies may show small per-trade profits despite overall profitability, while infrequent, high-impact trades can skew results. It can be influenced by survivor bias in backtests and by changes in liquidity or execution quality. Therefore, pertrade is best interpreted alongside complementary metrics such as total return, win rate, drawdown, and risk-adjusted measures.

See also. Return per trade, gross and net profit, risk-adjusted performance metrics, trading performance benchmarks.