Free tools to help you plan trades, manage risk, and project growth.
Calculate potential profit or loss for any trade
Profit
+$500.00
Pips
+50
EUR/USD · 1 lot(s)
Enter the opening and closing prices of your trade along with the lot size. The calculator will compute your profit or loss in both pips and your account currency. For buy trades, profit = (close - open). For sell trades, profit = (open - close). Exchange rates are updated daily.
A profit calculator tells you how much money you'll make or lose on a trade before you open it. Pair, lot size, entry price, exit price. It gives you a number. Done.
Most retail traders skip this. They see a setup, click buy, and only check the dollar amount after closing. By then there's nothing to manage.
We build trading tools at FXTool, and we've watched this play out hundreds of times. "I think this trade should make about $500." You think? The math takes 10 seconds and gives you an answer down to the cent. The calculator at the top of this page does it with live exchange rates — no reason to guess.
There's a hidden benefit too. A profit calculator forces you to pick an exit before you enter. That one step filters out a surprising number of bad trades. If you can't name a realistic close price, you probably shouldn't be in the trade.
The core formula is straightforward:
For a sell trade, flip the subtraction: (Open Price - Close Price). Contract size depends on the instrument — one standard forex lot is 100,000 units, one gold lot (XAU/USD) is 100 ounces, and Bitcoin varies by broker.
If the quote currency isn't your account currency, there's one more step: convert the profit at the current exchange rate. This catches people off guard on cross pairs. Trading EUR/GBP on a USD account? Your profit lands in GBP first, then needs conversion. The difference can be 5-15% depending on rate moves during the trade.
Buy 1 lot of EUR/USD at 1.0850, close at 1.0900. Contract size: 100,000 units.
50 pips at $10 per pip on a standard lot. If your account is in USD, that's your number. EUR account? Divide by the current EUR/USD rate.
Not sure about pip values for different pairs? Our pip calculator breaks it down for any instrument.
Real numbers beat theory. Here are three scenarios covering most situations you'll encounter:
Buy 2 lots of EUR/USD at 1.0800. Close at 1.0860. USD account.
60 pips x $10/pip x 2 lots. Clean math because the quote currency matches the account currency. No conversion needed.
Sell 0.5 lots of GBP/USD at 1.2700. Close at 1.2620. USD account.
80 pips x $10/pip x 0.5 lots. The profit comes from the price falling — something beginners often forget is possible.
Buy 1 lot of EUR/JPY at 162.50. Close at 163.00. USD account.
The profit is in JPY because that's the quote currency. To get USD: divide by the USD/JPY rate. At USD/JPY = 155.00, that's 50,000 / 155 = $322.58. This extra conversion step is why cross-pair profits feel unpredictable — until you calculate them upfront.
| Scenario | Pair | Lots | Pips | Profit (USD) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Long EUR/USD | EUR/USD | 2.0 | +60 | $1,200 |
| Short GBP/USD | GBP/USD | 0.5 | +80 | $400 |
| Long EUR/JPY | EUR/JPY | 1.0 | +50 | ~$323 |
The formula gives you the raw number. Your real-world profit is always less. Here's where the money goes:
The spread is the gap between bid and ask price. You pay it on every single trade. On EUR/USD with a 1-pip spread and a standard lot, that's $10 gone before the trade moves. Exotic pairs? Spreads can hit 5-15 pips — $50 to $150 per lot just to get in.
ECN brokers typically charge $3-7 per lot per side ($6-14 round trip). Spread-based brokers bake the commission into a wider spread instead. Either way, you're paying. A 20-pip target on a pair with $14 round-trip commission means 7% of your gross profit is already spoken for.
Hold overnight and your broker charges or credits you a swap rate based on the interest rate differential between the two currencies. Day traders barely notice. But if you're swing trading and holding for days or weeks, swap adds up fast. USD/TRY and USD/MXN can have swap rates that either boost your profit significantly or quietly destroy it.
According to data from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Triennial Survey, emerging market currency pairs have widening interest rate differentials, making swap costs an increasingly important factor in profit calculations.
You place an order at 1.0850. You get filled at 1.0852. That 2-pip gap is slippage. It happens during volatile moments — news releases, market opens, liquidity gaps. You can't eliminate it, but you can avoid trading around high-impact events like NFP releases or central bank decisions.
From our experience running EAs at FXTool: average slippage on major pairs during normal hours is 0.3-0.8 pips. During news events, it jumps to 2-5 pips. That difference matters when you're calculating tight profit targets. Our margin calculator helps you prepare the capital requirements for volatile periods.
Want to know how much to risk per trade, not just the profit? Our position size calculator ties profit targets to risk management so you're sizing positions correctly — not just chasing a number.
Knowing your potential profit is half the equation. The other half: how much do you lose when you're wrong?
A trade that can make $500 sounds great. But if the stop loss risks $1,000, your risk-reward ratio is 1:0.5. You'd need to be right more than 67% of the time just to break even. Most strategies don't sustain that.
At FXTool, every EA we build has a risk-reward filter baked in. Our trend-following systems won't take trades below 1:1.5. Our scalping EAs require at least 1:1.2 because their higher win rate compensates. We learned this the hard way — before implementing these filters, our backtests showed drawdowns 30-40% deeper on the same strategies.
Here's how win rate and risk-reward interact:
| Risk:Reward | Min Win Rate to Profit | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| 1:1 | 50%+ | Breakeven baseline |
| 1:1.5 | 40%+ | Comfortable for most strategies |
| 1:2 | 33%+ | Sweet spot for swing trading |
| 1:3 | 25%+ | Works for trend-following |
| 1:0.5 | 67%+ | Dangerous unless your accuracy is exceptional |
Use our risk-reward calculator alongside this profit calculator. Calculate the profit, calculate the risk, check the ratio. Only then decide if the trade is worth taking. This is the line between trading and gambling.
And once you understand the ratio, look at how it compounds over time with our compound calculator. A small edge in risk-reward, applied consistently across hundreds of trades, creates a massive difference in long-term account growth.
We talk to traders at FXTool every day. These are the profit-related mistakes we see come up again and again:
1. Calculating profit but ignoring costs. A 30-pip gain on a pair with a 3-pip spread and $7 commission per lot means your real profit is about 24 pips. The tighter your target, the more this matters. Scalping a 10-pip target with a 3-pip spread? Thirty percent of your potential profit goes to costs before the trade even plays out.
2. Forgetting swap on multi-day holds. A swing trade held for two weeks on a pair with -$15/day swap costs you $210. If your profit target was $300, a third of it just evaporated. Always check your broker's swap table before holding overnight. According to Investopedia's rollover guide, negative swaps on certain exotic pairs can exceed the spread cost within a few days.
3. Fantasy risk-reward ratios. Targeting 100 pips with a 5-pip stop looks incredible on paper. In reality, normal market noise will trigger that 5-pip stop long before the trade has a chance. Your stop needs room to breathe. If you're unsure how to set stops properly, our risk management guide walks through it step by step.
4. Only looking at best-case scenarios. Before entering any trade, you should know three numbers: best case profit, worst case loss, and the risk-reward ratio. If you only know the first one, that's not trading — it's hoping.
5. Ignoring currency conversion on cross pairs. Your EUR/GBP trade made 50 pips. But your account is in USD, and the GBP/USD rate shifted during the trade. Your actual USD profit could be 10-15% different from what you expected. The calculator at the top of this page handles the conversion automatically using live rates.
6. Moving the take-profit mid-trade. You set a target at +50 pips. Price hits +40 and stalls. You bump the target to +60 because "it might keep going." Then it reverses and you close at +10 — or worse, at a loss. Set the target before the trade. Respect it. This is one of the hardest disciplines in trading, and it's where a profit calculator helps most: when you calculate the number in advance, you're less tempted to change it on the fly.
7. Not accounting for drawdown. You might calculate that a strategy profits $2,000/month. But if it has a $5,000 drawdown along the way, can you stomach that? Can your account survive it? Use our drawdown calculator to understand the worst-case path to that profit number.
This isn't just a page we built and forgot about. We use this profit calculator internally when developing and testing our MetaTrader EAs. Here's what the workflow looks like:
Before every backtest run, we calculate expected profit per trade for a given pair and lot size. If the expected profit per trade doesn't clear our cost threshold (spread + commission + average slippage), the setup gets rejected before we even run the backtest. This saves hours of testing on setups that can't be profitable after costs.
We also use it for cross-pair validation. When an EA trades EUR/JPY or GBP/CHF, the profit in quote currency needs conversion. We've seen cases where a strategy looked profitable in JPY terms but was marginal after USD conversion due to unfavorable exchange rates during the testing period.
The takeaway: profit calculation isn't just something you do once before a trade. It's a filter you apply at every stage — strategy design, backtesting, live execution, and review.
It calculates how much money you'll make or lose on a trade based on entry price, exit price, lot size, and currency pair. The calculator on this page uses live exchange rates for accurate cross-currency conversions.
Use the formula: (Close Price - Open Price) x Lots x Contract Size. For a sell trade, reverse the subtraction. When the quote currency doesn't match your account currency, convert at the current exchange rate. Our calculator handles this automatically.
Pip value is how much one pip of price movement is worth in your account currency. For EUR/USD on a standard lot, one pip = $10. On a mini lot, $1. Your total profit = pips gained x pip value x lots. Use our pip calculator for exact values on any pair.
Directly. Double the lot size, double the profit — and double the loss. A 50-pip move on 0.1 lots earns $50. The same move on 1.0 lot earns $500. This is exactly why position sizing matters.
They reduce it. A 1-pip spread on a standard lot costs $10. A $7 round-trip commission adds to that. On a 30-pip trade, you're looking at about $17 in costs — roughly 6% of gross profit. On shorter trades, the percentage climbs much higher.
Most regulated brokers offer negative balance protection, so typically no. But not all brokers have it, and extreme events (like the 2015 CHF flash crash) have caused accounts to go negative. Always verify your broker's policy. Use our margin calculator to understand your exposure.
1:1.5 or better is a solid starting point. A 1:2 ratio means you only need a 33% win rate to be profitable long-term. Our risk-reward calculator shows the exact break-even win rate for any ratio you choose.
Swap is the interest charged or credited for holding a position overnight. It's based on the rate differential between the two currencies. On multi-day holds, swap accumulates and can meaningfully change your final profit — positively or negatively. Check your broker's swap table before entering any swing trade.
Same formula, different contract size. One standard lot of XAU/USD = 100 ounces. If you buy at $2,350 and sell at $2,360, your profit is ($2,360 - $2,350) x 1 x 100 = $1,000. Gold has wider spreads than major forex pairs, so always factor that into your net profit.