Gross P&L is a feeling. Net P&L is the bank balance.
Between the two sits a stack of statutory and broker charges that never asks whether you were right.
There is a specific kind of disappointment familiar to active Indian traders: the P&L screen says one thing all week, and the ledger says something smaller on Friday.
Nothing is broken. You are simply looking at two different numbers.
The stack between the two
Gross is entry minus exit times quantity. Net is what remains after brokerage, GST on brokerage, STT, exchange transaction charges, SEBI turnover fees, stamp duty, and anything else printed on the contract note.
On a low-turnover delivery book that gap is a rounding error. On a high-frequency F&O book it is the story of the year.
A busy quarter where costs took roughly 35% of gross. Illustrative journal data, not a live book and not a performance claim.
Where the CSV quietly lies
Plenty of broker tradebooks contain only fills. Contract notes and tax P&L reports contain the charges. If your journal imports the first and not the second, every dashboard is gross and should say so in the label.
Gross is still useful for studying entry timing. It is useless for the sentence "I made money this month".
The line even winners run into
SEBI’s work on individual F&O traders has repeatedly found that a large majority end up net negative, and that even the profitable minority hand over a meaningful slice of those profits as transaction costs. In the FY25 study, 91% of individual traders in equity derivatives were net losers, with aggregate net losses of about ₹1.06 lakh crore.
You cannot control the crowd statistic. You can absolutely compute your own cost ratio and put it on the FY card next to the green number.
Key takeaways
- Never judge the month on gross if the question is your bank balance.
- Label dashboards as gross when the import has no charges.
- Compute your own cost ratio instead of borrowing a headline.
Where these numbers come from
- SEBI FY25 study on individual traders in equity derivatives (Indian Express summary)
- BusinessLine — retail F&O losses widen 41% in FY25
Not advice, not a call. NiyataBook is a personal trading journal, not a SEBI-registered investment adviser or research analyst. Everything above looks backwards at trades that already closed. What happened in a book does not promise what happens next, and F&O can take a year’s savings in a week.