Your broker shows you ₹45,000 profit for the quarter. But you also deposited ₹2,00,000 mid-quarter. Is your actual return 22.5%, or much lower? Without a capital ledger, you don't know — and most traders are fooling themselves.
Retail traders typically measure performance as: How much money did I make? That's P&L. But P&L alone doesn't tell you how hard your capital was working to generate that number.
Two traders both make ₹50,000 in Q1. Trader A started with ₹2,00,000 and made no deposits. Trader B started with ₹1,00,000 and deposited another ₹3,00,000 mid-quarter. Their P&L is identical. Their ROI is not even close.
The broker P&L screen shows net profit but has no knowledge of how much capital you deployed over the period. It cannot calculate ROI for you.
The most accurate ROI formula for an actively funded trading account is:
Where Average Capital Employed accounts for the timing of deposits and withdrawals — capital you added late in the quarter shouldn't get the same weight as capital you had from day one.
Average capital employed is a time-weighted measure of how much capital was actually in your account and available to trade. The simplest version:
| Event | Date | Amount | Running balance |
|---|---|---|---|
| Opening balance | Jan 1 | — | ₹2,00,000 |
| Deposit | Feb 1 (day 32) | +₹1,00,000 | ₹3,00,000 |
| Withdrawal | Mar 1 (day 60) | −₹50,000 | ₹2,50,000 |
Capital × days calculation:
Average = (62,00,000 + 84,00,000 + 77,50,000) ÷ 90 = ₹2,48,333
If net P&L was ₹45,000: ROI = 45,000 ÷ 2,48,333 = 18.1% — not ₹45,000 ÷ ₹3,00,000 = 15%.
Say you made ₹20,000 in January on ₹1,00,000 capital (20% ROI), then added ₹5,00,000 in March and made ₹10,000 on that. A naive full-quarter calculation would show ₹30,000 P&L on ₹6,00,000 ending capital = 5% ROI — badly understating January's performance.
The reverse is also a trap: withdrawing profits late in the period makes your ending capital look small, so simple P&L ÷ ending balance overstates your ROI.
To compare quarterly trading performance against other asset classes (FD rates, mutual funds, Nifty returns), convert to annualised ROI:
A consistent 5% quarterly ROI annualises to 21.6% — not 20%. Compounding matters.
Tradrix's Capital Ledger handles all of this automatically. You log:
Tradrix then calculates time-weighted average capital for any period you select, and shows ROI on the dashboard alongside your P&L — so you always know the real number without any spreadsheet work.
Period ROI in Tradrix = Net P&L for the period ÷ Average Capital Employed for the period. This is calculated fresh every time you change the date range on your dashboard.
To give you a sense of context:
Knowing your actual capital-aware ROI is the first step to knowing where you stand — and which strategies, setups, and time periods are actually generating alpha.
What counts as "capital" — should I include the value of open positions?
Use cash capital deployed to the account (opening balance + deposits − withdrawals). Unrealised P&L from open positions isn't yet realised capital, so keeping it separate gives a cleaner picture of cash-on-cash return. Tradrix follows this convention.
My account is used for both delivery and intraday. How do I separate ROI?
Tradrix lets you filter the dashboard by trade type (delivery, intraday, F&O) — so you can see which segment is actually generating returns on the capital deployed to it. Capital ledger applies to the account as a whole; segment P&L is a drill-down on top.
Does this matter if I don't withdraw profits often?
If you never deposit or withdraw and simply compound within the account, simple P&L ÷ opening balance is fairly accurate. The distortion grows with active capital management — which is exactly the behaviour disciplined traders should be doing. So yes, it matters more as you get better.
Related: Trading journal for India · Zerodha trading journal · FIFO P&L explained