HOW TRADEPIKO TRACKS R MULTIPLES.

An R multiple only works if you know the initial stop, meaning the price where you planned to be wrong when you took the trade.

Without it there's nothing to divide by. A journal can still show you dollars and percent, but it can't show you R.

Most journals solve that by asking you to type a stop into every trade. TradePiko reads it from the stop orders you actually placed at your broker, picks out the one that was your real initial stop, and keeps it. Below we'll explain exactly how that works, including the cases where it can't find one and what happens then.

If you'd like the measure itself first, R-multiples, explained covers the definition, the arithmetic and what 100 real trades look like in R.

The calculation

1R is what the trade stood to lose at entry. It's the distance from your first entry price to your initial stop, times the shares on that first fill. A trade's R multiple is its P&L divided by 1R.

Say you buy 100 shares at $50 with a stop at $48. That makes 1R $200. If you then sell for a $600 profit, the trade was +3R. For a short, the distance runs the other way round (stop minus entry).

Two of the choices here are deliberate:

• The first fill sets 1R. Adding to a winner later doesn't change what the trade originally risked, so adds don't shrink or grow 1R. The extra profit from an add shows up as a bigger R, which is the whole point of adding.
• The P&L is your real result. Partial sells, adds and fees are all in it, so a trade that gapped through the stop shows up as worse than −1R. That's information, not an error.

Which stop counts: the 5-minute rule

Most swing traders don't place one stop and leave it alone.

You enter, put a stop in, and then nudge it a minute later once the spread settles or you've had another look at the chart. Hours or days later you move it to breakeven, or start trailing it. Only one of those is the initial stop, and it isn't always the first one you typed.

So here's TradePiko's rule: the initial stop is the last stop order placed within 5 minutes of your entry filling. Anything you adjust in those first few minutes counts as setting the stop. Anything after that is managing the trade, and it never changes the trade's R.

A few details make the rule hold up in real accounts:

• Bracket orders count. If you sent the stop together with the entry order and the entry filled later, the stop still counts. The window opens a minute before the entry order went in, not when it filled.
• A late stop is still a stop. If no stop was placed in the first 5 minutes, TradePiko uses the first stop you placed later that same day.
• Only the losing side counts. A stop above a long's entry (or below a short's) isn't initial risk, so it's ignored.
• Your own entry always wins. If you type a stop in, it replaces the broker's, now and later.

Once a stop is known, it's kept for good

There's a hard limit on the broker side. TradePiko connects to brokers through SnapTrade, and SnapTrade's order history only reaches back 90 days at most. A stop order from a year ago is gone from the broker's side, and no journal that uses a broker connection can fetch it.

So TradePiko doesn't rely on fetching it again.

Every 5 minutes during market hours, and once more after the close, it copies your new stop orders and fills from the broker into your account and keeps them. That happens whether or not you have the app open.

The first time a trade's initial stop is worked out, it's saved with the trade, and it's never recalculated or deleted. The order disappears from the broker's history after 90 days, or sooner (some brokers only return your last 100 orders), but the stop stays in your journal. Every trade you take while connected keeps its stop.

When you'll see "Add SL"

A trade with no known stop shows Add SL instead of an R. Hover over it for the explanation, or click it to type the stop in. You'll see it when:

• The trade is older than the broker's 90 days and happened before you connected.
• The trades came from a CSV. A CSV export has fills, not stop orders.
• There was no stop order. A mental stop never reaches the broker, so there's nothing to read.
• The broker only shows the stop at breakeven. On a broker that edits stops in place, a trade from before you connected, whose stop you've since moved, has lost its original price.
• The saved stop is on the wrong side of the entry, which is usually a typo. The hover text will tell you.

You can hover over any R value to see where its stop came from (for example "from your broker's stop order placed 9:48 AM ET") and how many dollars the trade risked. Clicking it lets you change the stop.

R on open positions

Live Positions has the same R Multiple column for trades that are still open. It's the open P&L divided by the initial risk.

So a position showing +2.4R has made about two and a half times what it risked. That's a quicker read on whether to take something off than a dollar figure, which depends on how big you happened to trade. Open trades in the trades table show the same number.

Brokers that edit stops in place

Some brokers move a stop by editing the existing order, rather than cancelling it and placing a new one. The order keeps its original time, but the broker only reports the new price. So once you move it to breakeven, the original stop is gone from the broker's records.

That's why TradePiko saves each new stop every 5 minutes. It gets stored 6 to 11 minutes after you place it, just after the 5-minute window closes, and normally long before any breakeven move.

A broker stop sitting right at your entry (within 0.5%) is treated as already moved, not as your initial risk, so a breakeven scratch never shows up as a full −1R loss. That trade shows Add SL instead, and the hover text says why.

How other journals handle R

For comparison, here's what their own help pages said as of October 2026:

• TradeZella calculates R once you enter a stop loss on each trade, or set default stop rules (for example a fixed dollar distance) that fill in on imported trades. Its help pages describe those stops as entered or rule-based, and they don't mention reading stop orders from the broker.
• Tradervue asks you to enter each trade's initial risk in dollars, or set one default risk amount for every imported trade. Switching reports to R needs its Gold plan, and trades without an initial risk are left out.

A default risk or a rule-based stop is quick, but it's an assumption, and it isn't the stop you actually traded. Reading the real order is what makes the difference.