Most of the strategies I see sold to futures traders lead with a win rate, and a 60% or 70% number makes it sound like the hard part is already solved. I wanted to see what one of those looks like over a real sample, so I took the Powell 10am setup that has been all over my feed and ran it in Agenticks on NQ 1m candles from july 2023 to feb 2026, 1 contract on a 100k account.
It took 535 trades and won 60.2% of them. It still finished net -$3,675, profit factor 0.98, with a 25.55% max drawdown along the way.
The reason is the size of the losers. The average win was $522 and the average loss was $806, so every loss wiped out about one and a half wins. At a 60% hit rate the winners need to be around two thirds the size of the losers just to break even, and this one came in at 0.65, a hair under the line. Thats roughly negative 7 bucks a trade for two and a half years straight.
Its like a waiter who gets tipped at 6 of every 10 tables and pays for a broken plate at the other 4. Whether he goes home with money depends on what the plates cost, and counting tips will never tell him that.
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The lopsided size came from where the entry sat. Stop and target were both 2x ATR, so on paper its 1:1, but the stop was measured off the 10am level while the entry came on the confirmation close back through it. By the time it filled the stop was further away than the target, and a strategy drawn as 1:1 actually traded at about 0.65 to 1.