Forex Profit & Loss Calculator

What this calculator does

A profit and loss (P/L) calculator turns the gap between your entry and exit prices into two numbers traders actually care about: how many pips the trade moved in your favour (or against you), and what that move is worth in your account currency. Plug in the pair, your lot size, the entry and exit prices, and the direction (buy or sell), and the result updates instantly.

It answers the question every trader asks after closing a position — "so what did I actually make?" — without you re-deriving contract sizes and quote-currency conversions by hand.

The formula

There are two steps: pips first, then money.

Step 1 — pips moved. Pips measure the raw price distance, normalised by the instrument's pip size:

pips = (exit − entry) / pipSize      (for a buy)
pips = (entry − exit) / pipSize      (for a sell)

For most FX pairs pipSize = 0.0001; for JPY-quoted pairs (USD/JPY, EUR/JPY) it's 0.01.

Step 2 — profit in money. Profit scales the price difference by your contract size and lots:

priceDiff = (exit − entry)           (buy; flip the sign for a sell)
profit    = priceDiff × contractSize × lots

One standard lot is contractSize = 100,000 units of the base currency; a mini lot is 10,000 and a micro lot is 1,000. If the quote currency is your account currency (typically USD on a USD account), that's your final figure. If the quote currency is not USD, the raw profit lands in the quote currency, so you divide by the exit price to convert back:

profit = (priceDiff × contractSize × lots) / price   (quote ≠ account currency)

Worked example

You buy 1 standard lot of EUR/USD at 1.0850 and close at 1.0900.

• priceDiff = 1.0900 − 1.0850 = 0.0050
• pips = 0.0050 / 0.0001 = 50 pips
• profit = 0.0050 × 100,000 × 1 = $500

Because EUR/USD is quoted in USD and your account is in USD, no conversion step is needed — +50 pips = +$500. Halve the size to 0.5 lots and the same move yields +$250; the pip count stays 50 because pips are size-independent.

Now a quote-≠-USD case: you sell 1 lot of USD/CHF at 0.8900 and cover at 0.8850. As a sell, priceDiff = 0.8900 − 0.8850 = 0.0050 → 50 pips. Raw profit = 0.0050 × 100,000 = 500 CHF, which you divide by the exit price 0.8850 to get ≈ $565 in your USD account. That divide-by-price step is the part traders most often forget.

Pitfalls and edge cases

• JPY pairs change the pip size. A 50-pip move on USD/JPY is 0.50 in price, not 0.0050. Feeding a 0.0001 pip size into a JPY pair overstates your pip count by 100x — the calculator handles this, but check the pair field is right.
• Direction flips the sign, not the magnitude. A short that drops 50 pips is a gain; the same prices entered as a buy show a 50-pip loss. Set direction before reading the result.
• P/L is gross. This figure excludes spread, commission, and overnight swap. On a raw-spread account those costs are small but real — net profit = gross P/L − spread cost − commission − swap. Run the spread and swap calculators alongside this one for the full picture.
• Cross-currency conversion uses live rates. For pairs where neither leg is your account currency, the exact account-currency value depends on the prevailing conversion rate at close, so treat non-USD results as close approximations.

Knowing your P/L before and after a trade is how disciplined traders size sensibly and set realistic targets. FXNX runs the four NX accounts on raw spreads from 0.0 pips, so the gross figure here stays close to what actually lands in your balance.