A surprising number of P&L journals I see are wrong because of tick size and pip value mistakes. I have made most of these myself.
Mixing points and pips. On a 5-digit EURUSD quote, one pip is 10 points. A journal that logs "15" without saying which is ambiguous, and I have seen people report 150-pip winners that were really 15 pips.
Assuming a pip is always worth 10 dollars per lot. That is true for pairs quoted in USD like EURUSD. For USDJPY, EURGBP or USDCHF, the value depends on the exchange rate and changes every day.
Gold and silver. A one-dollar move on XAUUSD is not one pip, and contract sizes differ between brokers. Check the symbol specification for contract size and tick value on your own account.
Indices. Tick size and tick value vary between brokers and between CFD and futures versions of the same index.
Account currency. If your account is in EUR or GBP, every USD-quoted P&L is converted, which adds another small difference.
My fix: I record results in R and in account currency taken directly from the deals tab, never calculated by hand. If my own pip estimate and the platform's number disagree, the platform wins and I find out why.
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Tick size vs pip value mistakes that inflate your P&L journal
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LondonScalper
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Shadow Trader
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Re: Tick size vs pip value mistakes that inflate your P&L journal
One more thing that inflates journals is reading the profit column on its own. MT5 lists commission and swap in separate columns, so a scalper copying only profit can overstate a month without any pip mistake at all.
On my numbers that gap was about 7 dollars per lot round turn, and at 40 lots a month it came to 280 dollars. That was more than a third of what the profit column alone showed.
USDJPY is the clean example of the rate effect. At 150.00 a pip on one lot is 1,000 yen, roughly 6.67 dollars, so a journal that books it at 10 overstates every yen trade by half.
Gold is where I have seen the biggest errors. With a 100 ounce contract a one dollar move is 100 dollars per lot, but one broker I used had a different contract size on the same symbol name, so copied lot sizes meant different risk.
On R, I like your approach and add one detail. My R is the planned stop plus costs, so a trade stopped out with slippage shows up as minus 1.1R rather than a tidy minus 1.
Do you log swap separately too? On positions held overnight it changes the picture more than people expect.
On my numbers that gap was about 7 dollars per lot round turn, and at 40 lots a month it came to 280 dollars. That was more than a third of what the profit column alone showed.
USDJPY is the clean example of the rate effect. At 150.00 a pip on one lot is 1,000 yen, roughly 6.67 dollars, so a journal that books it at 10 overstates every yen trade by half.
Gold is where I have seen the biggest errors. With a 100 ounce contract a one dollar move is 100 dollars per lot, but one broker I used had a different contract size on the same symbol name, so copied lot sizes meant different risk.
On R, I like your approach and add one detail. My R is the planned stop plus costs, so a trade stopped out with slippage shows up as minus 1.1R rather than a tidy minus 1.
Do you log swap separately too? On positions held overnight it changes the picture more than people expect.