Turnover
Σ per-trade leverage = how many times the account equity was turned over by trading volume across the whole period. notional summed relative to equity at each entry.
- Computed from
- Trades list
- Scope
- Single report
- Range
- ≥ 0
- Direction
- Context-dependent
Turnover is how much trading you did, weighted by how big each trade was. It's the sum of every trade's leverage — how big your position was compared to your account money (your equity). For each trade you take the full size of the position you controlled (the notional — much larger than your cash, because leverage lets you control more than you have) divided by your equity when you opened it, and you add those up across every trade. A turnover of 500 means that, summed over the whole record, you put 500 account's-worth of positions through. It blends two things into one number: how many trades you made and how big each one was. And it keeps piling up the longer you trade — it's a running total over the record, not a yearly figure.
How it's calculated
Turnover = Σ over all trades ( notional value in USD / account equity at open in USD )
- notional value
- lots × contract size (the units per lot — 100,000 for a standard forex lot) × open price, converted to USD — the full currency value of the position, not the margin posted
- account equity at open
- the account's equity at the minute the trade opened, converted to USD (floored at 10% of median positive equity)
What it tells you
A raw turnover number is hard to band on its own — it depends on both your style and how long the record runs. So the bands below are turnover per year: divide the raw total by the number of years in the record first, then read the row. There's no universally good or bad value here — low turnover isn't virtuous and high turnover isn't reckless. What matters is whether your edge survives the cost (see the next section), so most of these read as neutral pending that check.
| Value | Reading | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| < 10 / year | Buy-and-hold-ish | A handful of account-sized deployments a year. Position-trading or investing. Costs are a rounding error; the edge has to come from the moves themselves. |
| 10 – 100 / year | Active | Swing-to-active trading. Costs start to matter but rarely dominate a real edge. |
| 100 – 1,000 / year | High-frequency-ish | Day-trading / frequent intraday. Costs are now a serious drag — the edge has to clear them with room to spare. |
| > 1,000 / year | Pure churn | Scalping / high-frequency. This lives or dies on execution cost, not signal. Only viable with a genuinely cost-beating edge; otherwise costs grind it down regardless of the signal. |
Worked example
Say your record holds 200 trades, averaging about 2.5× leverage each. (Turnover sums the per-trade leverage, so it's the trade count times the average leverage — not the median you'd read off Trade Leverage; on a skewed book the two differ.) Turnover ≈ 200 × 2.5 = 500 — over the life of the record you put 500 account's-worth of positions through.
Now the cost angle, which is the whole point. Suppose the round-trip cost — what you pay to open and close — is about 0.02% of the position's value each time (spread + commission). Total cost drag ≈ 500 × 0.02% = 10% of the account, eaten by costs over the record. So a strategy whose gross edge (before costs) over that span is under 10% ends up net negative (a loss after costs) — the costs alone consume it. Double the turnover to 1,000 (same positions, twice the churn) and you need a 20% gross edge just to break even. These figures are illustrative — and 0.02% is a best case (tight broker, major pairs like EURUSD); crosses, exotics, and standard retail accounts pay several times that, so plug in your own cost. The shape is the lesson: turnover × cost-per-trade = your drag, and it's a multiplier, not an add-on.
Turnover, leverage, and cost
Three numbers describe your exposure footprint, and they form a triangle:
- Trade Leverage — the size of a typical bet (the median of per-trade leverage).
- Turnover — the total of all bets, summed (this metric).
- Cost drag — turnover × cost-per-unit-of-notional.
Leverage tells you how big each bet is; turnover tells you how much betting you did in total; the product of turnover and your per-trade cost tells you how much of your account the broker quietly took. The natural follow-up question — is my edge worth all this churn? — is edge per unit of turnover: gross profit divided by turnover, i.e. how much you earned per unit of exposure deployed. That's the number that actually decides whether a high-turnover style is paying for itself, and it's where high-frequency strategies are won or lost: not on the signal, but on whether the edge clears the cost the turnover multiplies.
High turnover also flags limited scalability: a churning strategy that works at small size tends to decay as the account grows — bigger orders get worse fills, and the edge per unit of turnover shrinks. A low-turnover edge usually scales further than a high-turnover one of the same headline return.
Pitfalls
- It's a running total — the #1 caveat. Turnover grows with record length, so a long record looks "busier" purely for being long. Divide by years (turnover per year) before comparing two records, or the comparison is meaningless.
- It blends frequency and size. A turnover of 1,000 could be 1,000 tiny trades or 100 large ones — the number can't tell you which. Always read it next to Trade Leverage to separate churn-by-count from churn-by-size.
- It says nothing about edge. High turnover isn't bad and low turnover isn't virtuous. A high-turnover strategy with an edge that clears its costs is fine; a low-turnover one with no edge still loses. Turnover is a cost lens, not a quality verdict.
- The cost angle is the real point — pair it with actual cost figures. Turnover only becomes useful once you multiply it by your real spread + commission per unit of notional. On its own it's just an activity count.
- Turnover captures per-trade costs, not time costs. Spread and commission scale with notional traded — that's what turnover multiplies. Swap (overnight financing) doesn't: it scales with how long you hold, not how much you churn. A low-turnover position held for months can rack up huge swap that turnover never sees, while a scalper who's flat overnight pays almost none. For carry or swing styles, check swap separately — turnover under-counts your true cost.
- Relies on quote→USD conversion. Notional is computed in USD from M1 quotes, same as leverage; missing or thin quote data makes the per-trade terms — and the sum — unreliable for the affected trades.
- A few huge-leverage trades can dominate the sum. Because turnover adds per-trade leverage, a handful of oversized bets can swamp the total. The tail that skews leverage's mean skews turnover too — check Trade Leverage's p90.
Related
Trade Leverage is its sibling — turnover is the sum of per-trade leverage, leverage the median · Profit Factor and Expectancy measure the edge that must survive turnover × cost · Max Drawdown is the risk that the size half of turnover amplifies.