Profit is a vanity number
Telling someone you are up a few hundred euros says nothing about skill. Did you risk ten euros or ten thousand to get there? Over fifty decisions or five thousand? Through a smooth ride or a terrifying one? Raw profit ignores all of it. Serious investors judge performance the way any fund does: return measured against the risk and the capital it took to produce.
The three metrics that actually matter
ROI — return on investment — is your profit divided by the total amount you put at risk. It answers "how efficiently did my capital work?" Yield is closely related: profit divided by total staked, the cleanest measure of edge per decision. And maximum drawdown is the largest peak-to-trough fall your capital suffered along the way — the metric that tells you how much pain the returns actually cost.
Why you must read them together
Any one metric in isolation lies. A great ROI over thirty bets is mostly luck. A strong yield with a 60% drawdown describes someone one bad week from ruin. Reading return, yield and drawdown side by side is what separates a genuinely good process from a story that happens to be ahead right now. It is the difference between "I am up" and "I have a measurable, repeatable edge per euro risked."
Make the curve your scoreboard
Track your equity curve over time and watch all three numbers move together: is yield holding up as the sample grows, is the drawdown staying within the limit your risk profile allows, is ROI stabilising rather than swinging wildly? That dashboard, not the single profit figure, is how an investor actually knows whether the edge is real.