Why include a losing trade that followed every rule correctly?

Because a strategy with real edge still loses a meaningful minority of the time even when executed perfectly. Showing a fully compliant loss alongside a win demonstrates that the stop distance and risk sizing were appropriate for a scenario that did not resolve as expected.

What made the third example invalid rather than just unlucky?

It violated two checklist items before the outcome was known: the level had already been swept once earlier in the session, and the entry was taken seventeen minutes before a scheduled US CPI release, both of which the entry checklist explicitly excludes.

Why was the realised loss on the third trade larger than the planned risk?

Gold does not honour stop prices during a data-driven gap; it fills at the next available price. The CPI-driven gap moved price more than four dollars beyond the stop before the order could fill, turning a planned $100 risk into a realised loss of roughly $160.

How is lot size calculated in these examples?

Risk in dollars divided by the stop distance in dollars per ounce. On the 100-ounce XAUUSD contract, an $8.70 stop with $100 of risk gives roughly 0.11 lots, because each $1.00 move costs $100 per 1.00 lot.

Should a partial exit at the mid-range always be used?

These examples use it because it is the setup's stated management rule, and in example 1 it protected roughly half the gain from a pullback that occurred before the second target was reached. It is a structural rule, not a discretionary choice made trade by trade.

Three Worked Gold Liquidity Sweep Trades — Annotated

A clean sweep win, a valid sweep loss, and an invalid sweep that should never have qualified all use the same £20,000 account risking 0.5% per trade (00). The difference between them is not luck; it is whether the excursion depth, the calendar, and the reclaim close actually satisfied the entry checklist before the trade was taken.

Three annotated XAUUSD liquidity sweep trades on a £20,000 account risking 0.5% (00) per trade illustrate the setup's full range of outcomes: a clean win at the London open sweeping the Asian low for +2.1R, a fully checklist-compliant loss at the New York overlap for -1.0R, and an invalid trade — a second sweep of an already-spent level taken minutes before a CPI release — that lost -1.6R after slippage.

Lot sizing in every example follows the same formula, risk in dollars divided by the stop distance in dollars per ounce, reflecting that a .00 move on the 100-ounce XAUUSD contract is worth 00 per 1.00 lot, so an $8.70 stop against 00 of risk sizes to roughly 0.11 lots.

The invalid trade cost more than its planned risk specifically because it violated the two conditions — a spent level and proximity to a scheduled release — that also predict the worst slippage, which is why journaling separates violation losses from valid losses rather than averaging them into a single win-rate figure.