Risk Management · Lesson 2
Risk of Ruin: Calculating Your Survival Probability
A trader with a 60% win rate and a 2% risk per trade still faces a non-trivial probability of account destruction. Here is the math, and how to tilt it.
Author
Somchai Wattana, CMT
Peer reviewer
David Chen, CFA
18 min readPublished April 8, 2026Reviewed April 18, 2026
Survival probability is a calculable number. Most traders never calculate it.