The two numbers
MAE — Maximum Adverse Excursion. The furthest a position went against you before it closed. How close you came to being stopped out.
MFE — Maximum Favourable Excursion. The furthest it went in your favour. How much was on the table at the best moment.
Neither is in your P&L, because a profit column records one point on a path — the end — and throws away the shape of everything before it.
What MAE tells you that nothing else does
Consider two winning trades, both +40.
- Trade A ran to +45, came back, closed at +40. MAE: −3.
- Trade B fell to −95, hung there for an hour, recovered, closed at +40. MAE: −95.
Identical in every statistic you normally look at. Completely different in what they say about your risk.
If your stop was at −100, trade B was five points from being a loss. Repeat that pattern thirty times and the outcome is not skill — it is a sequence of near misses that will eventually stop missing. A win rate built from trades like B is a description of luck that has not run out yet.
The practical use is blunt: if your winners routinely have a large MAE, your stop is not protecting you — the market is.
What MFE tells you
The mirror question: of the move that was available, how much did you keep?
- MFE +120, closed +40 → you captured a third.
- MFE +45, closed +40 → you captured nearly all of it.
Again identical in the P&L, and again completely different. The first says your entries find real moves and your exits leave most of them behind. The second says your exits are fine and more profit has to come from better entries or bigger size.
This is the number that settles the most common argument a trader has with themselves — whether to work on entries or exits. It cannot be answered from results, because both problems produce mediocre results. It is answered directly by how far your trades ran after you left.
Where the numbers come from
They require the price path during the trade — the high and low the position saw while it was open.
Your statement has your entry, your exit, and nothing between. So MAE and MFE cannot be reconstructed from an export, and any tool computing them from an uploaded file is either fetching external price history and guessing at your instrument's exact feed, or making it up.
In our case they are derived on ingest from the terminal-side connection, which sees the position as it lives rather than after it closed. That is why they appear in the app and not in the free file-based analyzers on this site.
Reading them together
The pair is more useful than either alone:
| MAE | MFE | What it usually means |
|---|---|---|
| small | close to your exit | execution is working; scale is the next question |
| small | far beyond your exit | entries find moves, exits leave money behind |
| large | close to your exit | you are surviving on recoveries — check your stop |
| large | far beyond your exit | wide, unstructured trades; the plan may not exist |
The bottom row is worth naming. Large in both directions means the trade wandered a long way in each direction while you held it, which usually indicates position size or timeframe chosen by mood rather than by a rule.
The honest limit
These numbers describe what the price did, not what you thought. A large MAE could be a trade you sat through deliberately, according to a plan that expected it. The same figure could be a trade you froze on.
The file, and the connection, record the first thing perfectly and the second not at all. That gap is the reason a journal has a notes field, and the reason the intent vs execution analyzer exists — it reads the plan you set at entry, which is the closest a machine gets to knowing what you meant.