Query regarding P&L in “Position” Section

Hi Zerodha Team @nithin ,

I did a Normal MIS buy order on XYZ scrip. I made a loss of 100 (say). I closed the position.
When the scrip started moving in my direction, I again did a MIS buy order on the same scrip.
When i checked the Position section, the P&L was -80. This led me to the confusion that perhaps
the 2nd trade too made loss and hence I closed the 2nd position as well.
Later i came to know that the 2nd trade was actually going in profit (+20).
What wrong in Kite is that the P&L of the closed position is getting added to the P&L of the
open (current) position.
Because of such confusions i lost 400 (including similar trades in other scrips).

My questions are :

How to know the P&L of the current open position ?
What is the need of adding up the P&L of the closed positions of the same scrip ? Because anyway in the
“Day’s History” section just below it, P&L of the closed positions are showing.
Please help experts…

Regards

Your suggestion will make position section too lengthy. That may be liked by very few.

It seems that you are in very early stage of trading career. My experience of early days was similar when very little loss also scares very much and I used to loss situational awareness. It happens occasionally even now.

Suggest you to trade in smaller size so that you can watch the different movements calmly. Best of luck.

@Pk308 Bro suppose i have done 20 MIS trades on the same scrip, 19 been closed, then the sum
P&L of those closed 19 positions (just sum, not the individual 19) can be put in "Today’s History"
below while the Positions should show the sum of P&L of all the open positions, in this case 1.
Will it not be easy to understand for all ?

Yes, it seems like a simple solution, but it isn’t. Imagine there is an open position that has resulted from multiple trades. To determine which trades have resulted into this position, you have to either do LIFO or FIFO. We do this on console/Q when calculating at end of day. Running such a calculation live when millions of trades are being executed without affecting any other process is a tough technological challenge. Maybe in the future.

3 Likes

Got another good insight of complexity of user interface.

@Pk308 simple solution…when u enter second time on the scrip just enter ur enter price and qty and target exit price in a paper. Then watch the trade and compare against ur paper writing. Place a limit exit order also.

Thanks @nithin but is there any workaround to know the P&L of the current position ?
e.g. presently i have one position (10 shares of xyz scrip). I am interested to know the P&L
of this trade only. Manually checking the LTP every time (because it’s intraday) is quite challenging.