Forex Profit Calculator

One trade, five correct answers

Take a long on a major pair from 1.1000 to 1.1050 at one standard lot, contract size 100,000, pip size 0.0001, account in the same currency as the quote. That is 50 pips, and 50 pips at 10 a pip is 500. On a 10,000 balance that is 5 percent. With a stop 20 pips away the risk was 200, so the gross is 2.5 R. Take the costs off — 1.2 pips of spread is 12, a 7 commission and 5 of financing is 24 in total — and the net is 476, which is 4.76 percent of the balance and 2.38 R.

None of those five is the "real" one and none of them is wrong. Pips are what the chart shows. The quote currency figure is what the platform computes. The account currency figure is what lands in your balance. The percentage is what it means to you. The R figure is the only one you can compare across trades of different sizes, because it is a ratio and the other four are not. A page that gives you one of them is not lying to you; it is just answering a different question from the one you had.

The trade starts at a loss

You buy at the ask and the mark is the bid, so the instant a long is filled it is down by the spread. Add the commission and any financing and the trade has to travel before it earns anything. In the example above that distance is 2.40 pips: 1.2 pips of spread plus 1.2 pips to cover the 12 of commission and financing at 10 a pip. Against a 50 pip target the costs are 4.8 percent of the move. Against a 10 pip target they are 24 percent of it.

That is the whole argument for putting costs in the same calculation as the profit. A target measured in pips does not know what it costs to reach, and the shorter the target the larger the share of it that goes out again. It is also why the losers are worse than they look: the costs are charged on the losing trades too, so a trade that lost exactly 1 R actually lost 1 R plus whatever the round trip cost.

Leverage is not in the formula

Profit is pips x pip size x contract size x lots. Leverage appears nowhere in it, and no page can put it there. What leverage changes is the size of the lot you are allowed to open, and through that the size of the profit — but the same lot on a 30:1 account and on a 500:1 account earns exactly the same money. Search for a profit calculator with leverage in it and you are usually looking at a margin calculator wearing the wrong label.

The one place leverage reaches the outcome is indirect and it is not in the profit line: it decides how far price can travel before the platform takes the position away from you. That is a different calculation and it lives on the forex margin calculator.

The conversion happens when you close, not when you open

A long on a yen pair from 150.00 to 151.00 at one standard lot wins 100 pips, and with a pip size of 0.01 and a contract size of 100,000 that is 1,000 yen per pip, so 100,000 yen. If your account is in pounds, that is not a fixed number of pounds. It is 100,000 divided by whatever the pound-yen rate is when the trade is closed: 526.32 at 190.00, 531.91 at 188.00. Same pips, same yen, 5.60 more in your pocket, entirely because a rate you were not trading moved by just over 1 percent.

The consequence people miss is on the open position. Floating profit is converted at the current rate, not at the rate when you entered, so an open trade's profit figure in your account currency keeps moving even when the price of the pair does not. If you are measuring a position against a target written in your own currency, the target is not a fixed number of pips.

A long has a floor. A short does not.

The profit formula looks symmetric and the risk behind it is not. A long on EURUSD at 1.1000 has a worst case: the price falls to zero, which is 11,000 pips against you, and there is nothing below that. A short on the same pair at the same price has no worst case at all — 11,000 pips against it puts the price at 2.2000, and the price can keep going. Both directions are leveraged, and only one of them is bounded.

It is the same asymmetry that shows up on the deposit side: a short's required margin rises as the price rises, so a short runs out of room sooner than the long does. That one is measured on the forex margin calculator, where the distance to the stop-out is the answer rather than the profit.

Four sizing rules, two machines

Fixed lots, fixed money at risk, fixed percent of the current balance, fixed percent of the starting balance. People argue about these four as if they were four different things, and when the stop distance is the same on every trade they are two. Fixed money is fixed lots: a fixed sum of money at a fixed number of pips is a fixed number of units, so the lot size is the same each time. Fixed percent of the starting balance is also fixed money, because the starting balance does not move. Only the first and the third behave differently, and the difference is one word: fixed lots adds, fixed percent multiplies.

Adding and multiplying only pull apart over a long run. Over one hundred trades with fifty winners at 2 R and fifty losers at 1 R, starting from 10,000 with 1 percent risked on the first trade, fixed lots ends at 15,000 and fixed percent ends at 16,284.27 — about 8.6 percent more, from the same trades in the same order. That gap is not a better strategy. It is the difference between taking your risk as a fixed sum and taking it as a share of what is left, and it is the only thing on this page that compounding does.

Order does not change where you end up. It changes the hole on the way.

Run the same hundred trades with all fifty losers first and you finish at exactly the same 15,000, or exactly the same 16,284.27. That is not a coincidence and it is not a rounding artefact: adding is commutative and so is multiplying, so a fixed run of results lands in the same place whatever order it arrives in. Both rules are order-blind on the ending balance.

The drawdown is not. Fifty losers in a row on fixed lots takes a 10,000 balance down to 5,000 before it recovers to 15,000 — a 50 percent drawdown. The identical trades alternating produce a 0.98 percent drawdown. On the percentage rule the same two orderings are 39.50 percent and 1.00 percent. Same trades, same ending balance, and one of them is a run you would have quit in week three.

The practical reading is uncomfortable and worth stating plainly: the ending balance is the least informative number in a track record. Two traders can show you the same curve endpoint and one of them went through a hole that would have ended the account at half its size. Whether you survive the path is a different question from whether the arithmetic pays.

What this page does not assume

No commission, no spread and no financing figure. Every one is a field, because every one of them is a property of an account and a symbol that this page cannot see. Nothing here is averaged, typical or assumed.

No conversion rate. The rate the profit is converted at is a field too, because it is set at the moment the trade is closed and not before. This page does not forecast it and does not fill in a plausible one.

No win rate, no average winner, no average loser. Those are the two middle tools' inputs, and they are yours to enter, not figures this page has an opinion about.

No tax. Whether a profit is taxed, at what rate and in which year depends on where you live and how you are set up, and none of that is arithmetic this page can do. The figures above are gross of any of it.

No slippage and no gaps. Every price here is the price you say you got. A stop is an order that fills where it can, and a gap fills it at a price that never traded — the difference belongs to the market, not to this calculation.

And no recommendation between the sizing rules. The table above shows what each one does to the same trades. Which one you can hold through is not something a calculator can tell you, and this page does not pick one for you.

Frequently asked questions

How do you calculate profit in forex?

Pips x pip size x contract size x number of lots, which gives the profit in the pair's quote currency. Convert it into your account currency at the rate that applies when the trade is closed, then take off the spread, the commission and any overnight financing. The first tool on this page does all four steps and shows each one separately.

How much profit is 50 pips?

It depends entirely on the size. On EURUSD at one standard lot, 50 pips is 500, because a pip is worth 10 at that size. On a micro lot of 0.01 the same 50 pips is 5. On a yen pair the pip size is 0.01 instead of 0.0001, so 50 pips on one standard lot of USDJPY is 50,000 yen. The pips do not carry the money — the lot size and the contract size do.

How do I calculate forex profit with lot size?

That is what the first tool takes as its input. Enter the lot size, the contract size for the symbol and the pip size, then either the entry and exit prices or the move in pips, and it returns the profit in pips, in the quote currency, in your account currency, as a share of your balance and in R. The same fields cover the two things people usually add to that question: the spread goes in its own field rather than being ignored, and the account size is what the share-of-balance row is measured against.

How do I calculate forex profit in pips?

Pips are the distance, not the money: on a four-decimal pair one pip is 0.0001 of the price, and on a yen pair it is 0.01. Set "You have" to "The pips already" and the tool works from the distance alone, which is enough to get the money figure as long as you know the lot size and the contract size.

Does leverage change my profit?

Not directly. Profit is pips x pip size x contract size x lots, and leverage is not one of those four. Leverage decides the largest lot you can open, so it changes the profit by changing the size — but a given lot earns the same money on a 30:1 account as on a 500:1 one. What leverage does change is how far price can travel before the platform closes the position, and that is measured on the forex margin calculator.

Is this a forex profit and loss calculator?

Yes — it is the same arithmetic read in both directions. A profit and a loss are the same calculation with the sign the other way: enter a negative number of pips, or put the exit price on the losing side of the entry, and the result comes back negative with the costs still coming off. The costs are why the two directions are not mirror images — on a losing trade they are added to the loss rather than taken off a gain, so a trade that lost exactly what you risked lost slightly more than that.

Why is my broker's profit figure different from my pip count?

Three reasons, and all three are in the first tool. Costs come off: the spread is charged the moment you are filled and the commission and financing come off the top. The conversion is done at the rate when you closed, not the rate when you opened, so the account currency figure is not the quote currency figure divided by anything you saw when you entered. And if the trade is still open, the floating figure is converted continuously, so it moves when the cross moves even if the pair does not.

What is break-even in pips?

How far price has to travel in your favour before the trade is worth more than it cost to put on: the spread in pips, plus the commission and financing divided by the money one pip is worth. In the example at the top of this page it is 2.40 pips. On a wide-spread symbol, a small lot or a trade held for weeks it can be several pips, and every one of those pips is a pip you have to earn before the trade earns anything.

What does R mean?

R is the amount you risked on the trade, and a result in R is the profit divided by it. Risking 200 and making 500 is 2.5 R. It is the only one of the five figures that compares across trades of different sizes, because it is a ratio: 2.5 R on a micro lot and 2.5 R on a standard lot are the same trade. The R row on this page uses the stop distance you enter as the risk, and it reports the net figure, so costs shave a little off the R you would have got on a costs-free calculation.

What is a good R multiple?

The arithmetic side of that question has an answer and the rest of it does not. A result of 2 R on a third of your trades and minus 1 R on the other two thirds comes out level before costs, and costs push the win rate you need above a third. A result of 5 R needs a fifth of them. What the multiple does not tell you is how often a target that far away is reached, and that is the half of the question no calculator can answer — which is why this page reports the multiple and stops there rather than naming one to aim for.

Can this tell me where to put my take profit?

No, and nothing on this page tries to. What it does is the other half: give it a distance and it tells you what that distance earns in money, as a share of your account and in R, after costs. Where the level belongs is a read of the chart and of the trade — the figure this page gives you is what the level is worth once you have chosen it. The risk reward calculator is the page that compares a chosen target against a chosen stop.

How do I calculate profit on gold, XAUUSD?

The same four numbers, with gold's own contract size and pip size in place of the pair's — and those are not standard across brokers, which is why the gold page asks you to read them off your platform rather than filling them in for you. To calculate profit in XAUUSD on this page, put the gold contract size and pip size into the first tool exactly as they appear on your platform. The XAUUSD pip calculator handles the gold specification and the same profit arithmetic on it.

How do I calculate profit in my own currency?

Work it out in the pair's quote currency first, then convert at the rate that applies when the trade is closed. That rate is the "quote currency to your currency" field on this page — an INR account on a dollar pair puts the USD to INR rate there, a GBP account on a yen pair puts the JPY to GBP rate there. If your account is already in the quote currency it is 1 and the two figures are the same. It is not the rate from when you opened the trade, and it is not a rate this page guesses.

What win rate do I need to break even?

Without costs, the average loser divided by the average winner plus the average loser: a 200 winner and a 100 loser needs 33.33 percent. Costs move that line up, because every trade pays them whether it wins or not. At 6 a trade against a 200 winner and a 100 loser it becomes 35.33 percent. The third tool works it out both ways and shows the gap between them.

Does a winning trade always make money?

No. A trade can be right about the direction and still close at a net loss if it did not travel further than its break-even distance. On a 50 pip target with 2.40 pips of costs that needs a move of 2.40 pips; on a 3 pip scalp the same costs make most winners into small losers. This is the main reason a high win rate on very short targets and a modest win rate on long ones can end up in the same place.

Do I need my broker's own profit calculator instead?

For the exact figure that will land in your account, yes. A broker's calculator knows that firm's contract size, its commission schedule, its financing rates and the rate it will convert at, and none of those are things this page can see.

What this page adds is the parts a single figure does not show: the five ways of saying the same result, the break-even distance before the trade earns anything, the fact that the conversion happens at close, and what a run of trades does to a balance under rules that are usually presented as four and are really two. Those are the parts a single number hides.

Knowing what a trade earns is half the question; the other half is what it risks. The forex stop loss calculator turns your entry and stop prices into the size of the position, and the risk reward calculator works out the win rate a given ratio needs before it pays. The size of the trade itself, from the stop and the risk budget, is what the lot size calculator is for.