What Is Absolute Gain? Abs. Gain vs Gain

Absolute gain is the profit an account has realised measured against the money paid into it: net closed profit and loss divided by total deposits, as a percentage. Unlike a time-weighted figure, it makes no attempt to remove the effect of when that capital arrived. On ShowMyTrades it is the row labelled Abs. Gain.

How it works

Two quantities, both from the account's own history:

Abs. Gain % = Net closed P&L / Total deposits × 100

Net closed P&L = Σ (profit + swap + commission) over all closed trades
Total deposits = Σ every deposit ever credited to the account

Three properties follow, and each matters when reading someone else's page.

• The numerator is net of costs. Every closed trade enters with its commission and its swap already applied, so the figure is what the account kept, not what the trades looked like before the broker was paid.
• It counts closed trades only. Unrealised profit or loss on open positions is not in it. The number moves when a position closes, not when it moves against you.
• The denominator is every deposit, not the starting balance. An account funded in five instalments carries all five, including the one that arrived last week. Withdrawals appear in neither term, so taking profits out neither helps nor hurts the percentage.

Abs. Gain read against Gain

Gain, the row directly above it, is time-weighted return. Each closed trade contributes one factor — its net result over the balance standing before it — and those factors are multiplied together. Deposits and withdrawals move the balance but never create a factor of their own.

That has an exact consequence. On an account funded once and never topped up or withdrawn from, the chain of factors collapses to final balance divided by the deposit, which is 1 + Abs. Gain. The two rows print the same number, and separate only once cash has moved.

Fund an account with $10,000 and make $2,000: both rows read +20.00%. Now deposit another $10,000 and make $2,000 more. Abs. Gain is $4,000 / $20,000 = +20.00%. Gain is 1.20 × (1 + 2,000/22,000) − 1 = +30.91%, because the second $2,000 is measured against the $22,000 standing when it was earned, not against every dollar ever paid in.

Neither is wrong: Abs. Gain answers what the account returned on the money committed to it, Gain how well that money was traded. Only the second compares cleanly across accounts of different sizes.

Why it matters

The asymmetry runs one way, and that is the useful part. A rescue deposit after a bad month cannot lift Abs. Gain: fresh money lands in the denominator and nowhere else, so the percentage drops the moment it arrives and only trading brings it back. That makes it harder to manufacture than a steep balance chart, which any deposit will produce.

The same mechanism is the limitation. An account scaled up after it started working reads low even when every trade was good, because most of the denominator arrived after most of the trading. Read the pair, never one row alone.

What the data shows

The figures below describe accounts published on ShowMyTrades, not traders in general. Funding is rarely a single event here: 699 users run more than one account and 429 run accounts at more than one broker. Money moved between them arrives as a fresh deposit at the destination and enlarges its denominator permanently.

Across the published accounts with trading history (August 2026), built from 15,436,464 synchronised trades, the median time-weighted return is +3.2% and 63.0% of accounts are positive on that basis. Wherever an account's two rows disagree, the gap between them is measuring its funding history and nothing else.

Where you see it on ShowMyTrades

Abs. Gain is the second row of the Account Stats panel, directly under Gain, on every published account page and in the Complete Dashboard widget when that page is embedded elsewhere. The panel separates its blocks with a rule but prints no headings, so Gain, Abs. Gain, Avg Daily % and Avg Monthly % read as the first four rows.

Both ingredients appear further down the same panel. Profit is the numerator — net closed profit and loss in account currency — and Deposits is the denominator, with Withdrawals beside them so a reader can see what has been taken out without wondering whether it moved the percentage. It did not.

The value is not calculated in your browser. It is produced by our statistics service from the account's synchronised history and refreshed on each sync, and the same figure feeds the public page, the owner's dashboard and the widget alike.

Common misunderstandings

• "My open positions are in it." They are not. Floating profit and loss appears in the Equity row of the same panel, never in Abs. Gain.
• "A withdrawal lowered it." It cannot. Withdrawals are absent from both the numerator and the denominator.
• "A bigger Abs. Gain means better trading." Not across accounts. It also records when the money arrived: two identical strategies, one funded once and one topped up monthly, will not print the same figure.

For how this row reads alongside every other number on the page, see how to read a trading account dashboard.

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