System Quality Number Calculator - Rate Your TradingView Strategy
Calculate System Quality Number (SQN) from your TradingView strategy CSV. Van Tharp bands: poor, fair, good, excellent. Free, client-side, no signup.
Calculate System Quality Number From Your TradesWhat Is System Quality Number?
Imagine you ran two strategies. Strategy A wins 55% of the time with small gains. Strategy B wins 40% but the wins are three times bigger than the losses. Which one is better? Win rate alone cannot answer that. System Quality Number (SQN) can.
SQN is a single number that evaluates a trading system on three things at once: how much you make per trade on average (expected value), how consistent those trades are (standard deviation of returns), and how many trades you took. Van Tharp created it to answer one question: "Is this system good enough to trade with real money?"
The formula normalizes the average trade by its volatility and scales it by the square root of trade count. More trades help confidence. Bigger edge per trade helps too. Both matter.
Formula
How to Read This Number
Higher is better. Van Tharp defined seven bands that have become the industry standard for rating trading systems.
The key insight: SQN punishes inconsistency. A strategy that makes $100, -$50, $150, -$25 looks worse than one that makes $40, $35, $45, $50 even though the total P&L is similar. That's intentional. Consistency is what lets you size up with confidence.
SQN also rewards more trades. A strategy with 200 trades scores roughly 40% higher than the same equity curve with 100 trades. That is not a bug. It reflects the fact that more trades give you better statistical confidence that the edge is real and not luck.
What Counts as Good?
| Range | Value | What It Means |
|---|---|---|
| Holy Grail | > 7.0 | Exceptional. Very few retail systems reach this level. If you see this with fewer than 200 trades, question whether the data is cherry-picked. |
| Superb | 5.0 to 6.9 | Outstanding consistency and edge. Rare in live trading. Worth sizing up aggressively. |
| Excellent | 3.0 to 5.0 | Strong system with a real edge. Suitable for aggressive position sizing. |
| Good | 2.5 to 2.9 | Solid system for moderate position sizing. Worth trading with reasonable confidence. |
| Average | 2.0 to 2.4 | Barely acceptable. The edge is there but thin. Use conservative position sizing. |
| Below Average | 1.6 to 1.9 | Weak. The edge may be noise. Consider further optimization or a different approach. |
| Poor | < 1.6 | Not tradeable. The system has no reliable edge. Redesign before trading real money. |
How Pineify Calculates System Quality Number
I uploaded my own EURUSD trend-following system to Pineify expecting a "good" SQN because the profit factor was 1.8. The report came back at 1.4. Below average. I was annoyed until I realized my strategy had three monster winners early on and 40 tiny losers in the middle. The equity curve looked fine on TradingView. SQN caught what the eye missed: the trades were not consistent. Pineify calculates SQN directly from your TradingView CSV export. You upload the "List of Trades" file and we compute average trade, standard deviation, and apply the square root of N automatically. The result appears alongside Sharpe, Sortino, Calmar, and 13 other metrics in a single report. No Python scripts, no spreadsheet formulas, no manual calculations. There is a catch the academic papers do not tell you: below 50 trades the SQN standard deviation becomes unstable and the score jumps wildly if you add or remove one outlier trade. I now treat SQN as a directional guide rather than a precise grade when I have fewer than 100 trades.
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