Working out what you actually made

Your exchange shows one number. Your real result includes fees, funding and the margin you tied up.

Most traders can tell you what price did. Fewer can tell you what their position did after costs, and fewer still know their return on the capital they actually committed.

Spot trades

Buy 0.1 BTC at 60,000 and sell at 63,000. Gross profit is 3,000 × 0.1 = $300. At 0.05% per side, fees are (6,000 + 6,300) × 0.0005 = $6.15. Net: $293.85, a 4.9% return on the $6,000 committed.

Leveraged trades

The profit formula is identical — leverage does not change the arithmetic of price movement. What changes is the capital you committed and therefore your percentage return.

The same $6,000 position at 10× requires $600 of margin. A $293.85 profit is now a 49% return on margin — and a move against you of the same size would be a 49% loss. Leverage multiplies the percentage in both directions while leaving the dollar amount unchanged.

Shorts

Everything reverses. Note that funding on a short is often income rather than cost, since positive funding means longs pay shorts.

The costs people forget

• Both sides of the fee. Entry and exit are two separate charges.
• Funding on perpetuals. Paid roughly every eight hours, silently, for the whole hold.
• Slippage. The gap between the price you expected and the price you got. Bigger on thin markets and bigger orders.
• Conversion. Moving between quote assets costs a little each time.

The profit and loss calculator on this site includes all of these, and the true-cost panel pulls the live funding rate for the pair so you can see what a multi-day hold actually costs before you take it.

A full worked example, every cost included

Say you long 0.2 ETH at $3,000 with 5× leverage, exit at $3,180, and pay 0.05% per side. You held for four days at 0.01% funding per eight-hour period.

The two return figures differ by a factor of five, and both are correct — they answer different questions. Return on position tells you whether the trade idea was good. Return on margin tells you what the capital you tied up produced. Reporting only the second flatters your record; reporting only the first understates your capital efficiency.

Realised, unrealised, and why the distinction matters

Unrealised profit is a number on a screen. It changes every second and you have not received it.

Realised profit is what remains after you closed the position and paid every cost.

The gap between them is where a specific psychological failure lives. Traders anchor to the peak unrealised figure — the moment the position was worth most — and then experience closing at a lower level as a loss, even when the trade was profitable. That feeling produces holding past the exit, which turns winners into losers.

Tracking performance across many trades

Individual trade results tell you nothing. Four aggregate numbers tell you almost everything:

1. Expectancy per trade. Average result across every trade including losers. If this is negative, nothing else matters.
2. Profit factor. Gross profit divided by gross loss. Above 1.3 suggests something real.
3. Average win against average loss. If losses are larger, you are cutting winners early and holding losers — the most common destructive pattern and one that only shows up in aggregate.
4. Maximum drawdown. The deepest peak-to-trough fall. This is the number that decides whether you can actually run the strategy.

The journal calculates these automatically, and the tax export produces a clean spreadsheet of the underlying trades whenever you need one.

Currency, conversion and the figures that quietly drift

Two details distort records more than people expect.

Quote asset movement. A profit measured in a stablecoin is not the same as a profit measured in dollars if that stablecoin has drifted from its peg. The depeg watch panel exists partly for this reason.

Measuring in crypto rather than fiat. A trade that gained 5% in a coin whose price fell 20% against the dollar lost money in purchasing-power terms. Decide which currency your account is denominated in and measure everything in it consistently. Switching between the two — quietly, whichever looks better — is the most common way traders convince themselves a losing year was flat.

Common questions

Why is my exchange's profit figure different from mine?

Most platforms show unrealised profit before fees and funding, and some mark against a different reference price. Recalculate with every cost included; the exchange figure is an indication, not an accounting record.

Should I measure returns on margin or on position size?

Track both. Return on margin shows capital efficiency; return on position shows whether the idea itself was good. Comparing leveraged and unleveraged trades using only return on margin makes bad ideas look like good ones.

Do I owe tax on unrealised profit?

In most jurisdictions, no — tax generally applies when a position is closed or an asset is disposed of, and crypto-to-crypto trades usually count as disposals. Rules differ substantially by country, so confirm with a qualified professional where you live.