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Entry, stop-loss, take-profit & risk-reward — in plain words

Every Robin signal comes with four numbers: where to get in, where to get out if you're wrong, where to take your profit, and how those compare. Once you can read them, you can judge any signal in seconds.

We'll use the example above the whole way through. It's a short on GBP/JPY: Robin expects price to fall. Don't worry about the direction for now — the four numbers work exactly the same whether a signal is long or short.

The entry is the price at which the trade begins. In our example that's 214.60. Until price reaches that level, there's nothing to do; once it does, you're in the trade and the other two numbers start to matter.

Robin picks the entry deliberately, not randomly. It waits for price to reach a level where the odds are tilted in your favour — often after the market has swept out a high or low and shown its hand. A good entry isn't about getting the exact bottom or top; it's about getting in at a price where your stop can be tight and your target realistic.

The stop-loss is the price where you close the trade for a small, planned loss. For our short it sits at 214.72 — just above the entry, because this is a short and we're wrong if price rises instead of falls.

The stop is the most important number on the card. It's the line you draw before you have any money on the line, decided coolly in advance, so that a losing trade costs you a known, survivable amount instead of whatever the market feels like taking. The gap from 214.60 to 214.72 is 12 pips — that distance, in money, is your risk on the trade.

The take-profit is the price where you close the trade in profit. Here it's 214.36 — 24 pips below the entry. If price falls that far, the trade closes itself and the profit is yours; you don't have to be watching.

Setting the target in advance does the same job for your wins that the stop does for your losses: it takes the decision out of the heat of the moment. No staring at the screen wondering whether to get greedy or get scared — the level was chosen when you were calm, at a place where price has a realistic chance of arriving.

Risk-reward compares the two distances: how far to your stop versus how far to your target. In our example you're risking 12 pips to make 24 — twice as much reward as risk. That's written as 2.0R, meaning the potential reward is two times the risk (one "R" is simply the amount you put at risk).

This single number is what makes a trade worth taking or not. At 2.0R you can be wrong more often than you're right and still come out ahead over time: win once and you cover two losses. A signal that risks 24 pips to make 12 (0.5R) is the opposite — you'd need to win far more often than you lose just to break even. Robin grades and filters signals partly on this maths, which is why a "weak" read is sometimes just a trade where the reward didn't justify the risk.