Maximum Run-Up

Maximum Run-Up (MRU) measures the highest unrealized profit a trade reached at any tick before your exit — the best the trade ever looked on paper. It is a performance metric that reveals not just how much you made, but how much of the available move you captured, making it one of the most diagnostic tools for evaluating exit quality.

Formula & Calculation

Capture Rate = (Realized Profit ÷ Max Run-Up) × 100

Where:

• Realized Profit = Actual P&L at trade exit, in dollars
• Max Run-Up = Highest unrealized P&L at any tick during the trade, in dollars
• Capture Rate = The percentage of peak unrealized gain you actually kept

MRU is measured in dollar P&L terms, which distinguishes it from Maximum Favorable Excursion. MFE is the raw price distance from entry to the intraday peak (e.g., a stock moved $3.00 above your entry). MRU translates that price move into dollars using position size: $3.00 × 200 shares = $600 run-up. This distinction matters — the same $3.00 move means very different things on a 50-share position versus a 500-share position. MRU captures the actual dollar opportunity; MFE does not.

The capture rate is the diagnostic number. A trader averaging 35% capture on winning trades is exiting with less than half the available gain on every winner. The cause is rarely “holding too short” — it is almost always a trailing stop set too tight relative to the instrument’s natural volatility.

Benchmarks

Level	Capture Rate	What It Means
Excellent	70%–100%	Exits well-timed; trailing stops match instrument volatility
Good	55%–70%	Solid exit discipline with minor calibration possible
Average	40%–55%	Consistent with typical retail traders; exits firing slightly early
Poor	Under 40%	Stops too tight or fixed targets cutting winners prematurely

Context matters: mean-reversion traders may target 65–80% capture with tight exits, while trend-followers who trail wide may accept 50–60% capture in exchange for occasional outsized winners. Evaluate your capture rate against your strategy type, not a universal standard.

Practical Example

A trader buys 200 shares of NVDA at $112.00 with a stop at $109.50 — a risk of $2.50 per share, or $500 total. The stock runs to $118.80 intraday, a $6.80-per-share move. MRU = $6.80 × 200 = $1,360. The trader exits at $114.20 on a pullback, realizing $2.20 per share = $440.

Capture rate: $440 ÷ $1,360 × 100 = 32% — well into “poor” territory.

Reviewing 30 similar trades, the trader finds an average MRU of $1,100 and an average realized gain of $380, confirming a 35% average capture rate. NVDA’s average daily ATR during this period was $4.10. The $2.50 trailing stop was 0.61× ATR — too tight to survive routine intraday fluctuations on a trending stock. Switching to a 1.2× ATR trailing stop ($4.92) on a sample of subsequent trades raises the capture rate to 58%, moving from “poor” to “good” while only modestly increasing the frequency of larger giveback on reversing days.

How to Track Maximum Run-Up

1. Record the intraday extreme at exit — For longs, note the highest price reached during the trade. For shorts, the lowest. Pull this from your broker’s trade detail or time-and-sales data.
2. Calculate MRU in dollars — (Peak Price − Entry Price) × Shares for longs. (Entry Price − Trough Price) × Shares for shorts.
3. Compute capture rate per trade — Divide realized P&L by MRU and multiply by 100. Log this alongside your other trade metrics.
4. Segment by setup type — Filter your journal by entry pattern (breakout, pullback, mean-reversion) and compare average MRU and average capture rate across groups. A setup with high MRU but low capture points to a systematic exit mismatch, not a bad entry.

How to Improve Maximum Run-Up

1. Switch to ATR-based trailing stops — Replace fixed-dollar stops with a 1.0–1.5× ATR trail. A stop tighter than 1× ATR on an intraday chart is triggered by normal price noise more than 50% of the time on trending instruments. SPY’s daily ATR runs $2–$4 in normal conditions and $5–$10 when VIX exceeds 25 — your trailing stop distance must reflect the current regime.
2. Scale out at 1R, trail the rest — Exit 50% of your position when the trade reaches your initial 1R target. This locks in realized profit, reduces the emotional pressure to exit early, and lets the remaining position capture a larger run without the full position at risk.
3. Apply different exit logic by setup — If breakout trades show 2× the MRU of your mean-reversion trades, they need wider trailing stops. Applying a single exit rule across all setups suppresses capture on your best-running entries.
4. Review 100% capture trades separately — Trades where MRU equals or nearly equals realized profit were exited at the peak. Identify whether those exits were rule-based (e.g., target hit, time stop) or intuitive. Replicate the rule-based ones; treat intuitive exits as coincidental until proven repeatable.

Common Mistakes

1. Confusing MFE with MRU — MFE is a price distance; MRU is a dollar P&L figure. A trader comparing MFE on a 50-share position to MRU on a 300-share position is comparing incompatible numbers. Always convert to dollars before calculating capture rate.
2. Measuring MRU at the close instead of the intraday tick high — Closing-price MRU significantly understates peak unrealized gains, especially on volatile days. A stock that ran $4.00 intraday and closed $1.50 above entry has an MRU of $4.00, not $1.50. Using close-based MRU inflates your apparent capture rate.
3. Setting trailing stops to round numbers — Stops at $0.50 or $1.00 ignore the instrument’s actual ATR. On a high-ATR stock like NVDA, a $1.00 trail is noise; on a low-ATR utility stock, $1.00 may be three days of movement. Match stop distance to volatility, not to a familiar number.
4. Optimizing capture rate without checking Maximum Adverse Excursion — Widening trailing stops to capture more run-up also increases the drawdown you absorb before the stop triggers. Always evaluate MRU improvements alongside MAE to confirm you are not accepting disproportionate downside risk.

How JournalPlus Calculates Maximum Run-Up

JournalPlus automatically calculates Maximum Run-Up for every trade using the intraday high (or low for short positions) logged at exit, then displays the capture rate alongside realized P&L in the trade detail view. The analytics dashboard aggregates capture rate by setup tag, so you can see at a glance which entry patterns consistently leave money on the table. You can filter the trade log by date range, instrument, or setup type and export a capture rate summary to a CSV for deeper analysis. For traders working to calibrate trailing stops, the performance charts overlay MRU against realized P&L across a filtered trade set, making the gap between available gains and captured gains immediately visible. This is how the trade efficiency and MFE metrics connect to MRU in a single workflow inside the app.