Profit and loss is the difference between what you paid and what you got. It comes in two versions.
- Gross is before your broker's fees.
- Net is after them.
How Wildflower handles it
Each trade is stored gross, with its fee saved beside it as a separate figure. Nothing takes the fee out of the stored trade.
Everything that measures your account shows net: the Dashboard, Reports, and the Guardrails meters. The fee is taken off when the figure is shown. That way the fee is never lost, and two screens never disagree about the same trade.
Where net matters most
Guardrails always measures net. Your firm's rules are measured against your account balance, and fees come out of that balance. Each meter also records which basis it used.
Backtests show gross, and say so
In the Lab, a backtest's money figure is gross, because a backtest's trade list has no fee for each trade. Fees are shown next to it, at their full size. A fee per contract does not shrink when you halve your size, so it is never scaled down with the result.
Realised and unrealised
Realised is profit and loss on trades that have closed. Unrealised is on a position you still hold, marked at the current price. It keeps moving until you close.
What can go wrong
Your broker is the source of truth. When a fill arrives from your broker, it replaces any figure Wildflower estimated from the candle. It never works the other way round.