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Metrics· Glossary

What Is a Pip in Forex? Pip vs Point vs Pipette

A pip is the standard unit of price movement in forex, usually 0.0001. How pip value depends on lot size and quote currency, and why pip totals mislead.

A pip is the standard unit of price movement in a currency pair: 0.0001 for most pairs, 0.01 for pairs quoted in Japanese yen. It measures distance, not money. What a pip is worth depends on the contract size, the number of lots and the currency the account is denominated in, which is why two accounts can both report +3,000 pips and be a thousandfold apart in cash.

How it works

Pip size  = 0.0001            most pairs
          = 0.01              JPY pairs
Pipette   = 0.1 pip           the 5th (or 3rd) decimal

Pip value = Pip size x Contract size x Lots     -> in the quote currency
            then converted into the account currency at the current rate

EUR/USD, USD account, 1.00 lot:  0.0001 x 100,000 x 1.00 = $10.00 per pip
EUR/USD, USD account, 0.01 lot:  0.0001 x 100,000 x 0.01 = $0.10 per pip

Pip, point and pipette. Most brokers quote fractional pips, so EUR/USD prints five decimals — 1.08432 — and that final digit is a pipette, one tenth of a pip. MetaTrader counts in points, where a point is the smallest quotable increment. On a 5-digit feed, 10 points = 1 pip. An Expert Advisor configured with a 200-point stop has a 20-pip stop, and the same input on a 4-digit server would give it a 200-pip stop. Misreading that single conversion is one of the more expensive configuration errors in retail trading.

Outside forex the word travels badly. Gold, indices and crypto CFDs each carry a broker-defined contract size and tick size, and "pip" is used loosely for whatever the platform displays. The only safe reading there is the contract specification for that symbol on that server.

Why it matters

Pip value is the bridge between a stop distance and a risk amount, which makes it the core input of position sizing: risk in money equals stop distance in pips, times pip value, times lots. Get that conversion right and lot size becomes arithmetic instead of habit.

As a comparison metric between accounts, though, pips fail completely. The same pip total means a different amount of money at every lot size, in every quote currency, on every instrument, and on a cent account it means a hundredth of what it appears to. Pips also say nothing about the capital that was exposed to earn them, which is the only thing that makes one result comparable to another.

Percentages do not have this problem. Time-weighted return is comparable across account sizes by construction. Pips never are.

What the data shows

Across the public accounts on ShowMyTrades with trading history (August 2026), 1,724,575 lots have been traded and 15,436,464 trades synchronised. Position sizes in that population span several orders of magnitude, which is precisely why one account's pip total cannot be set beside another's and read as a ranking.

The figures that survive the comparison are the normalised ones: median TWR +3.2%, 63.0% of accounts positive over time, median deepest drawdown 9.7%, median 171 closed trades. Those hold their meaning whether the account holds $500 or $500,000.

Cost shows the same trick applied in the other direction. Those accounts have paid $4,782,670 in commissions across 1,724,575 lots — roughly $2.77 per lot. That number is comparable because it is divided by volume. The raw total is not.

Where you see it on ShowMyTrades

  • Advanced Statistics (the Table view; the same panel also switches to Weekday, Hourly and Duration) reports Total Pips, Best Trade (Pips) and Worst Trade (Pips), plus Expectancy, which is printed in pips and in account currency side by side. Beside them sit Total Lots, Total Trades, Win Rate, Avg. Trade Length, Total Commissions and Total Swap Paid. Read pips next to lots or they mean nothing.
  • Breakdown Statistics, on the By Symbol tab, splits pips into long, short and total per instrument, so you can see which pairs actually produced the movement.
  • The Closed Trades table under Trade History & Balance Progression has a Pips column per ticket, computed from Open Price and Close Price using the correct digit convention for that symbol.
  • The Account Stats panel opens with Gain, the time-weighted return, and prints Abs. Gain on the row directly below it. Those are the figures to quote when comparing yourself to anyone else.
  • The pip calculator converts a pip into money for a specific pair, lot size and account currency.

Common misunderstandings

  1. "A pip is $10." Only for one standard lot of a USD-quoted pair on a USD account. Change any of the three and the number changes.
  2. "Points and pips are the same." On 5-digit and 3-digit feeds, 10 points make 1 pip. Stop and take-profit inputs are usually in points.
  3. "More pips means a better trader." A thousand pips at 0.01 lots is $100. A hundred pips at 5.00 lots is $5,000.
  4. "Pips measure risk." Pips measure distance. Risk is that distance converted into money and then divided by equity.

To convert pips, lots and margin into figures for your own account, see the guide to forex calculators.