Anti-Martingale: Add to Winners
The anti-martingale increases position size as a trade moves in your favor and never as it moves against you. It is the inverse of the martingale, which doubles the stake after each loss. The stop must rise with every addition, so the whole position never risks more than the plan allowed.
Adding to a winner is the only form of averaging that survives arithmetic. It is also the hardest thing here to actually do.
How it works
The rule is one sentence: add size as a trade moves in your favor, never as it moves against you. Each later tranche needs a defined further move first.
The martingale is the opposite scheme — double the stake after every loss. Turn it the right way up and you get this. Grid trading is its chart-shaped cousin and fails the same way.
The inversion is sound because of where the risk sits. A loser’s risk is uncapped by the size you keep adding; a winner’s is capped by a trailing stop.
By the first addition you are risking the market’s money, not the original stake — provided the stop has moved. The win rate falls and the expectancy does not.
It loses often and small, and wins rarely and big. Which is arithmetically sound and psychologically the hardest shape there is to sit through, because most outcomes are unpleasant.
Where the additions go
Every addition needs a rule written before the trade, not a feeling during it. A new swing high, a measured advance, a multiple of the average true range (ATR) — “it looks strong” is trading psychology deciding for you.
And adding raises risk on a position that is already working. So the stop rises with each tranche, keeping the whole position inside what risk per trade allowed at the start.
Each addition pays the spread all over again. A plan with many small tranches is a plan with a large cost bill, whether or not the trend continues.
A thinning market is the wrong place to add. Falling volume into an advance means fewer participants behind the move — exactly when a larger position is least welcome.
In practice
This needs a long trend, and long trends are the minority state. Most price action is short swings back and forth, and most of the time there is nothing to add to. It suits trend following and position trading.
An opening gap can take back every addition at once. A stop names a level, not a price, and a market that opens beyond it fills the enlarged position somewhere worse.
So the stop moves up with each add, or this is not the anti-martingale. Trailed by a multiple of the 14-bar average true range, a tight multiple is hit by ordinary noise within a few bars, and a wide one survives longer but hands back more of the gain before it acts. Sooner or later every trailing stop is reached.
Each tranche is its own round trip, paying the spread and any commission again. Multiply one round trip’s cost by the tranches you intend for the real fee.
Sizing the additions
There are three ways to size the tranches and only one is easy to defend. Equal-size additions are the simplest to plan and the most expensive, because each one drags the average entry higher, so a routine pullback can take a comfortable position back to break-even.
Increasing size is worse again. The largest tranche is bought closest to the eventual high, which is the least attractive price in the sequence.
Decreasing size — halving each time, or something near it — is the more defensible default. It keeps the average entry near the original, and leaves the bulk of the position bought at the price you actually liked.
The trade-off is real and worth stating. A smaller final position, and a smaller win when the trend does run — which, in markets where long runs are the exception, is a price worth paying.
What the anti-martingale is not
It is not a way to be right more often — the win rate usually falls.
It is not risk management — it is a sizing rule that needs one underneath.
It is not a repair for a losing position — that is the martingale, and it is what this avoids.
And it is not free — every tranche pays the spread again and lifts the average entry.
How this connects
Its natural trigger is a breakout. A clean break of a level, or a fresh higher high in the market structure, gives each addition a price where the trend has just proved itself rather than a hope that it will.
A moving average or a Donchian channel can make the rule mechanical, adding only when price clears the prior channel high and never on a return inside it.
The chandelier exit is one way to raise the stop with each tranche. It hangs the stop a multiple of the average true range below the highest high since entry, so the enlarged position is protected by a level tied to the trend itself.
It sits badly with a fixed take profit. A profit target caps the rare large winner the method depends on, so most versions let the trailing exit decide when the trade is over.
Leverage turns the additions into margin call risk. Each tranche adds exposure to the same account, and a gap through the stop lands on the full enlarged size at once.
And a backtest is the honest place to set the tranche rules, because the balance between extra profit on long trends and extra cost in ranges is specific to each market.
When it fails
In a trading range it bleeds slowly and correctly. Each false start triggers an addition, the move reverses, and the enlarged position is stopped for more than the original would have lost. Nothing malfunctioned — the method paid for information.
The second failure is the average-entry surprise. Traders add, watch a routine pullback erase the open profit, and conclude the trade went wrong — when what moved was their own break-even.
A third is adding without moving the stop loss. That is not this method at all — it is a bigger position wearing the vocabulary of a smaller one, and the drawdown scales with the size, not the plan.
A fourth is the cost stack. Many tranches means many spreads, quietly consuming the edge the rare large winner was supposed to provide.
And a fifth is misreading probability. A trend is not more likely to continue because it has already run. The method never claims otherwise — only that losses are capped and winners are not.
The original data
One video in 24,971 titles is called “adding to winners”, and it has 359,180 views. One video, one channel, and among the most-watched things measured anywhere on this site. “Pyramiding” appears once, at 50,845 views. “Anti-martingale” appears once, at 23,800 views, and it is the only title that says martingale at all; “risk of ruin” and “expectancy” appear zero times, against 169 videos on “win rate” at a median of 15,735. Those counts are in this site’s search study: the method is known by a name nobody searches and searched for under a name nobody uses.
The question: The trend is running. Add, or protect?
And then the limit. A classic trigger for an addition is a fresh high, and on the S&P 500 from 1950 to 2026 only about 7% of trading days closed at a new record, with 68 separate declines of 5% or more interrupting the climb. Even in a market that rose for decades, clean continuation was the rare state, and most of the time there is nothing to add to — the honest limit of the method, not an argument against it. Write down where each addition happens and where the stop goes after it before you enter; if raising the stop with the add is not in the plan, this is not the anti-martingale, it is just a bigger position.
Related
Risk per trade sets the budget every addition has to stay inside. Trend following is the approach this rule was built for, because it produces the moves long enough to add into. And trailing stop caps the enlarged position, which is what makes this a method rather than a larger bet.
Adding to a winner feels wrong in a way that adding to a loser never does. When a position is finally working, every instinct says protect it, bank it, do not touch it — and the plan says put more on. The reliable fix is writing the add level down before you enter, so the decision is already made by someone calmer.
— Michael Whitman
This page is educational, not financial advice. Test every idea on your own charts before risking money.