Gross vs Net P&L
The number on your screen after closing a trade is probably not what you actually made. Understanding the difference between gross and net is the foundation of honest performance tracking.
What the difference is
Gross P&L is the raw profit or loss from price movement alone — the market moved X pips in your favour, here's what that's worth in dollars. Net P&L is what actually landed in your account after all trading costs are deducted: spread, commission, and swap.
On a spread-only account (no separate commission), gross and net are the same thing because the broker's cost is already baked into the entry price. On an ECN/STP account with raw spreads and a per-lot commission, they're different — and on active accounts, the gap is significant.
Why it matters more than it looks
Commission on a standard ECN account runs roughly $3–7 per lot per side, so $6–14 round-trip. On a 1-lot trade that makes $200 gross, that's a minor percentage. On a 10-lot trade targeting 20 pips, commission can represent 30–40% of the gross profit. Scale that across a month of active trading and gross vs net stops being a rounding error — it becomes the number that decides whether the month was actually profitable.
Traders who review performance without accounting for commission routinely overestimate their edge. A strategy with a 55% win rate and a 1:1.5 R:R looks great on paper. Factor in commission and it might be break-even or worse, depending on average trade duration and lot size.
How platforms handle this
This is where things get practically important, because platforms differ significantly in what they show you by default.
MetaTrader 4 and 5 record commission as a separate line item in the trade history. It's there — but it's excluded from most of the built-in summary views. The totals shown in the history tab, the account statement, and the terminal's journal all aggregate gross P&L. Commission sits in its own column and is not included in the bottom-line figure. This means the total your history shows will not match the actual change in your account balance unless you add the commission column yourself.
For reconciliation on MT4/MT5, the most reliable approach is to export the full history to a spreadsheet and sum the commission column separately, then add it to the gross total to get net. Third-party trade journals like Edgewonk handle this correctly when you import your history.
cTrader shows net P&L as the primary figure throughout the platform. Commission is displayed per trade and deducted in all summary totals — the number at the bottom of your history is the number your account balance moved by. No reconciliation needed. As a bonus, cTrader's trade history also records the slippage that occurred at each fill (requested price vs actual fill price), which makes it straightforward to audit execution quality over time.
Prop firm dashboards add another layer
Prop firms typically display P&L on their own dashboards, and whether those figures are gross or net varies by firm and isn't always clearly stated. Some show gross (your drawdown room looks better than it is until commission is deducted). Others show net. A few switch between gross and net depending on which screen you're looking at.
It's worth confirming with your firm which figure counts toward your drawdown limit and profit target. If drawdown is calculated on gross P&L but your trading costs are subtracted separately from your balance, you can be in drawdown territory on the balance before the dashboard triggers a warning.