Forex Profit Calculator

How the profit is worked out

A trade makes or loses money in its quote currency first, and only afterwards in yours. Three inputs set the size of the move — the two prices and the number of units — and two costs come off the top: the spread you crossed to get in, and the commission you pay for the round turn.

1. The pip size comes from the instrument. Most forex pairs quote to four decimals so a pip is 0.0001 of price; JPY pairs quote to two so a pip is 0.01; gold is quoted in dollars and its smallest quoted increment here is 0.01. You do not set this — selecting the instrument does.
2. The prices you type are the prices you are filled at. The spread is then charged on top, once, as its own line. That is the same convention this site's position-size engine uses, and it keeps the two numbers separate so you can see what the broker took.
3. The commission is the round turn, in your account currency. If your broker charges per side, put both sides in. It is subtracted once, at the end, after the currency conversion — which is why it is not converted and does not need a rate.

Precision is stated rather than hidden: money is shown to two decimal places, pips to one decimal place, and the conversion rate to six. Nothing is rounded up, and no intermediate figure is rounded before it is used.

What is deliberately not in any of it: overnight financing, slippage between the price you wanted and the price you got, and tax. Those depend on the broker, the hour and the jurisdiction, and a page that invented them would be producing a number you could not check.

Worked example: AUD/USD on an Australian dollar account

You are long 5 mini lots of AUD/USD — 50,000 units — from 0.6400 to 0.6480, on an account denominated in AUD, with a 1-pip spread and 7.00 AUD of commission. The pair is quoted in USD but your account is in the base currency, so the conversion has to happen once, at the end.

1. Price move: 0.6480 − 0.6400 = 0.0080, which at a pip size of 0.0001 is 80.0 pips.
2. Units: 5 mini lots × 10,000 units = 50,000 units.
3. Gross in the quote currency: 0.0080 × 50,000 = 400.00 USD.
4. Spread: 1 pip × 0.0001 × 50,000 = 5.00 USD.
5. Convert: your account is in AUD, the base currency of the pair, so the rate is 1 ÷ the entry price you typed — 1 ÷ 0.6400 = 1.5625. Gross 400.00 × 1.5625 = 625.00 AUD; spread 5.00 × 1.5625 = 7.81 AUD.
6. Net: 625.00 − 7.81 − 7.00 commission = 610.19 AUD. The costs took 14.81 AUD, or 2.37% of the gross figure.

Step 5 is where a profit calculator either stays honest or does not. The rate was not fetched from anywhere; it fell out of the entry price you supplied, and the page says that it came from there so you can judge whether it is the rate you would actually get. Type your own rate into the field instead and the page uses yours.

The same arithmetic on a losing trade

A trading profit calculator that only handles winners is half a tool, so the sign is carried all the way through. Short 2 mini lots of EUR/USD — 20,000 units — at 1.1000 and cover at 1.1040 on a USD account, with a 1.2-pip spread and 4.00 USD of commission:

• Price move: (1.1040 − 1.1000) × −1 = −0.0040, or −40.0 pips.
• Gross loss: −0.0040 × 20,000 = −80.00 USD.
• Spread: 1.2 × 0.0001 × 20,000 = 2.40 USD; commission 4.00 USD.
• Net: −80.00 − 2.40 − 4.00 = −86.40 USD.

The loss is larger than the price move alone suggests, and it is larger by a fixed amount rather than a percentage of anything. That is the shape of the whole problem the costs create: they do not scale with whether you were right, so the smaller your target, the bigger the share of it they eat.

Run the winning example above and this one through the calculator and each trade's costs come out on their own line, in that account's currency: 14.81 AUD on the winner (7.81 AUD of spread plus 7.00 AUD of commission, 2.37% of gross) and 6.40 USD on the loser (2.40 USD plus 4.00 USD, 8.0% of the 80.00 USD move). Two different trades, two different numbers — they differ in size, spread and commission. What they share is the property that matters: neither one moves with the outcome.

What the spread and commission take out of a trade

This is the part most profit calculators leave for you to work out, and it is the part that decides whether a trade was worth taking. The costs are a fixed amount of money; the move they are subtracted from is not.

The costs never move. On a hundred-pip swing they are a rounding error; on a ten-pip scalp they are nearly a fifth of the trade, and the trade has to travel further than you think before it is worth having. Anything that shows you the gross figure without the costs is answering an easier question than the one you asked.

The two fields exist because brokers charge in two different shapes. Some widen the spread and charge nothing; some quote a tight spread and take a commission per lot. Putting both on the page means the same tool works for either, and putting them on their own lines means you can see which one is actually costing you.

Where the exchange rate comes from, and when it is applied

From you. There is no rate feed on this page, no background request and no cached table of prices — a rate fetched once and shown all day is stale by the time you read it, and a rate that is guessed is worse than a rate that is missing.

• Your account currency is the quote currency — EUR/USD on a USD account. Nothing is converted and the rate used is exactly 1.
• Your account currency is the base currency — AUD/USD on an AUD account. The rate is 1 ÷ the entry price you typed, and the note above the results names that price so you can check it.
• Any other combination — GBP/USD on a EUR account. You type the rate. Leave it blank and the figures stay in the quote currency with a warning, and the commission is left out of the net because there is no honest way to combine the two.

One detail is worth stating because it is where the arithmetic usually goes wrong: the rate is applied once, to the whole profit or loss, not to each of the two prices. Converting the entry and the exit separately and then subtracting gives a different and larger number, because the conversion rate is not constant across the move. The page converts the difference, which is the money you actually gained.

Profit on gold, indices and crypto

An XAU/USD profit calculator is the same three steps with different constants. Gold is quoted straight in dollars per ounce, so on a USD account no conversion happens at all: this dataset carries a pip size of 0.01 and a contract of 100 ounces, which makes one standard lot 100 ounces and one pip worth 1.00 USD. A move from 2,400.00 to 2,405.00 is five dollars, or 500 of those pips, so one standard lot makes 500.00 USD before costs; with a 30-pip (0.30 USD) spread and no commission, the net is 470.00 USD.

The thing that trips people up on gold is that a dollar of movement is a hundred pips, not one, so a spread quoted in dollars has to be turned into pips before it goes in the field — 0.30 USD is 30 pips at this pip size. Index CFDs sit at the other end: their pip size is 1.00 and one contract is one unit, so one index point is 1.00 USD per lot and a twenty-point move is 20.00 USD. Crypto futures quoted in USDT use a pip size of 0.01 on one unit, so the arithmetic is the same shape as gold with a much smaller contract.

Choosing the size that puts those numbers on a stop you can survive is a different calculation — that one starts from dollars of risk, and the XAU/USD sizing page works through it in gold's own units.

One percent of price, five instruments

Every example above takes one instrument at a time, which hides the thing that actually decides the money: a pip is a unit of price, and the contract size is what turns it into a unit of money. Give five instruments the same 1% move in their own price — one standard lot, USD account, before costs — and the pip counts scatter while the money lands somewhere else entirely.

Four of the five pay the same 10.00 per pip at one lot, and gold pays 1.00 — so a hundred pips is 1,000.00 on EUR/USD, WTI, Brent and natural gas, and 100.00 on gold. The pip calculator does that conversion one instrument at a time; carried across five, it is the reason pip counts do not travel.

The two energies that look alike are the ones worth a second look. WTI and Brent carry the same pip size and the same 1,000-unit contract, so one dollar of price is 100 pips and 1,000.00 per lot on both. Natural gas has a pip one tenth the size and a contract ten times larger — 0.001 on 10,000 units — which leaves its pip worth the same 10.00, but makes one dollar of price 1,000 pips and 10,000.00 per lot. Same money per pip, ten times the money per dollar.

Now put the costs back on, because that is what this page is for. Same 1% move, one standard lot, USD account, 7.00 USD commission:

• EUR/USD 1.1000 → 1.1110, 1.2-pip spread: gross 1,100.00, spread 12.00, commission 7.00, net 1,081.00 — costs take 19.00, or 1.73% of the gross.
• WTI/USD 78.00 → 78.78, 5-pip spread (0.05): gross 780.00, spread 50.00, commission 7.00, net 723.00 — costs take 57.00, or 7.31%.
• NATGAS/USD 3.500 → 3.535, 10-pip spread (0.010): gross 350.00, spread 100.00, commission 7.00, net 243.00 — costs take 107.00, or 30.57%.

Three identical percentage moves, three very different amounts kept, and the difference is almost entirely the spread: it is quoted in pips, pips are 10.00 each on all three energy contracts here, so a 0.05-dollar spread on WTI costs 50.00 a lot and a 0.010-dollar spread on natural gas costs 100.00. The same pip count on gold would cost 10.00, because gold's pip is a tenth the size.

What this page covers

The instrument list holds 131 instruments: 67 forex pairs covering majors, minors and crosses, 4 metals, 3 energy CFDs, 12 index CFDs and 43 crypto futures quoted in USDT, plus a stock entry and a fully manual entry for anything not on the list. Pip size, contract size and unit step come from the open reference dataset published alongside this site, and both fields are editable if your broker quotes them differently.

Those specifications are typical retail defaults, not values published by an exchange or by any broker. Contract sizes and minimum increments vary between brokers and sometimes between account types at the same broker, so check the deal ticket before trusting a number produced here — the contract size in particular, since it is what turns a price move into money on gold, indices and energies.

Limits worth knowing before you rely on a figure: one trade at a time, one entry and one exit, no partial closes and no scaling in; no overnight financing, no slippage and no tax. Anything that would need those belongs in your broker's statement, not in a browser page that cannot see your account.

Overnight financing: the cost that sits between the two prices

Everything above measures one entry against one exit. Holding a position past the broker's cut-off adds a third term, and it is charged for time rather than for movement. People look it up under several names — forex swap calculator, swap calculator, carry trade calculator, interest rate differential calculator — and on crypto venues as a funding rate calculator or crypto funding rate calculator. All six are asking the same thing: what does it cost to still be in this trade tomorrow?

• The swap is a number your broker publishes, not something derived here. It is quoted per lot per night in the quote currency, usually positive for one direction and negative for the other, and it varies by broker, by account type and by symbol. Nothing on this page can know it, which is why it is a line in your statement rather than a field above.
• Three nights often land at once. Most brokers roll a position held over Wednesday by three days' worth of swap to cover the weekend, because no business date passes between Friday and Monday. That is a convention rather than a law, and it is worth confirming rather than assuming.
• A carry trade finances itself in theory and pays financing in practice. The interest rate differential between the two currencies in the pair is what makes a long position in the higher-yielding currency attractive, and it is already reflected in the swap — collect it if the differential is in your favour, pay it if it is not, and size against the cost either way.
• Crypto funding works on a clock, not at a cut-off. A perpetual charges funding at set intervals, typically every eight hours, at a rate that flips sign with open interest, and it is paid between longs and shorts rather than to the venue. Counting those payments over the holding window gives the same column in the same currency.

Financing belongs after the size has been chosen, not inside the stop distance. A trade planned around a tight stop that then sits for three weeks pays twenty-one nights of whatever the swap happens to be, and if the answer changes the economics of holding, the honest response is a shorter horizon or a smaller size rather than a stop moved to make the arithmetic look better. What the entry and exit alone were worth is still the figure printed at the top of this page.

What people call this

An fx profit calculator, a forex trading profit calculator and a forex pip profit calculator are all the same question asked with different words: given these two prices and this size, what did the trade make? This page answers all of them in the same place, and prints the pip difference alongside the money so the two views can be checked against each other.

The pip view is worth keeping next to the money view because it is the one that survives a change of size. A fifty-pip move is a fifty-pip move whether you held a micro lot or a standard one, and it is the number you compare against your spread and your typical slippage. The pip calculator goes the other way and starts from a pip count rather than two prices.

A profit figure tells you what a trade did. Sizing tells you what to do before it happens, and that calculation starts from the money you are willing to lose and the distance to your stop — the forex position size calculator takes those two and returns the size, and the forex sizing walkthrough works it through by hand.

FAQ

Related pages

• Forex position size calculator — start from risk and stop distance, and get the size back.
• Pip calculator — what one pip is worth at each lot size.
• Lot sizes explained — standard, mini, micro and nano, and which ones brokers actually offer.
• Position sizing for gold (XAU/USD) — dollars of risk rather than pips.
• How to calculate position size in forex — the same arithmetic worked by hand.
• Stock profit calculator — the same round trip priced per share instead of per pip, with the break-even sale price.
• Open reference dataset — the contract specifications behind the instrument list.