R-multiples turn every trade — win or lose, big or small — into a multiple of the risk you chose. It's the single most clarifying habit in risk management.
At the live tables
Free-play chips only. No real money.
Before you enter a trade, you decide two things: where you're wrong (the stop) and how much that costs (1R). Everything that happens after is measured against that unit. A stop-out is −1R. A gain of twice your risk is +2R. This does two powerful things: it caps every loss at the same size by design, and it makes your results comparable across wildly different positions and markets.
In risk management training, R-multiples make differently sized trades comparable. Record planned risk before entry, then log the actual result against that same amount; changing the stop after entry changes the trade, not the original 1R.
You risk $100 per trade on a $10,000 account. That $100 is 1R. A trade that loses your planned amount is a −1R trade. A trade that makes $300 is a +3R trade. Dollars stop being the scoreboard — risk units are.
You take three trades: −1R, −1R, +3R. Net: +1R — a profitable day even though you were wrong twice as often as you were right. R-multiples reveal that win rate alone tells you almost nothing; payoff size does.
Stop $2 below entry, target $6 above — that's a 3R setup. If your edge only wins 30% of the time, 3R targets still pay: 0.3 × 3R − 0.7 × 1R = +0.2R expected per trade. Coin-flip 1R setups pay nothing after the same math.
Over 100 trades you record: 25 winners averaging +2.5R, 75 losers at −1R. Expectancy = (0.25 × 2.5) − (0.75 × 1) = −0.125R per trade. That system loses money despite a 'good' win streak — and R-multiples show it instantly.
The free risk management quiz asks you to convert real trade records into R and to read expectancy from a series — the same arithmetic above. R-multiples is lesson two of the Risk Management Training Course. Read risk vs. reward, explore profit factor, or sit down free.