An account balance answers one question: what the account holds, valued a certain way, at one moment. It does not say whether trading made money. Deposits raise it without any skill, withdrawals lower it without any loss, and an open position can change it every second without a single trade completing. An honest review keeps five lines apart: realized profit and loss, unrealized (mark-based) profit and loss, fees, funding payments, and transfers in or out.
Why a balance is not a result
Suppose an account showed $1,000 last week and $956 today. That could be a loss. It could also be a $50 withdrawal hiding a small gain. Without a ledger, the two stories look identical. The guide to why a wallet balance is not portfolio profit makes the same point for on-chain holdings: transfers, missing history and valuation choices all change the estimate.
The practical habit is to classify every change in the account before calculating anything. Each line should say what it is, when it happened in UTC, which instrument it belongs to, and which source recorded it.
Realized and unrealized PnL are different claims
Realized PnL comes from a completed reduction or close: the quantity closed multiplied by the difference between exit and entry prices, under your chosen cost method. It is fixed once the fill is recorded. Unrealized PnL is an estimate for the part still open, usually calculated from a mark price. It changes as the mark moves and may never be collected. Keeping the definitions of realized and unrealized gains separate prevents a paper gain from being reported as finished profit.
State which price produced the unrealized figure. A mark, a last trade and a midpoint can differ, especially in a fast market, and an exit through the order book may fill somewhere else again.
Fees belong on their own line
Trading fees reduce results whether a trade wins or loses. Record them per fill, not as a monthly estimate. Hyperliquid’s fee documentation, for example, sets separate maker and taker rates by tier, with the tier based on rolling 14-day volume, and some tiers show maker rebates. Those details are venue-specific and can change; record the fee your account actually paid on each fill. The venue fee example shows how a tier and liquidity role change the amount.
Fees are not the only cost. Spread and slippage are already inside the fill price, so do not subtract them a second time. Network or withdrawal charges belong to transfers. The overview of crypto fees and spreads separates quoted prices from explicit charges.
Funding is a series of settlements
Holding a perpetual contract can create funding payments that are neither fees nor price PnL. Hyperliquid’s funding documentation says funding is paid every hour, that a positive rate means longs pay shorts, that funding is peer-to-peer, and that the payment uses position size multiplied by the oracle price and the funding rate. Note the price: the oracle price converts size to notional there, not the mark used for unrealized PnL. Other venues use their own intervals and conventions. The funding-rate guide explains sign and interval in detail.
Record each settlement as its own row with the rate, position size, conversion price and the signed amount the account actually posted. A missing record is unknown, not zero.
A fictional ledger across funding settlements
Every number below is invented. The account deposits $1,000 in a stablecoin, buys 2 units of a fictional perpetual at $100, holds through three hourly settlements, sells 1 unit at $103, withdraws $50 and marks the remaining unit at $104 before the next settlement. Fees use an assumed flat 0.05% of fill notional, not any venue’s schedule.
| Time (UTC) | Entry | Size after | Price used | Amount | Category |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 09:20 | Deposit | 0 | — | +$1,000.0000 | Transfer |
| 09:30 | Buy 2 at $100 | 2 | $100 fill | −$0.1000 | Fee |
| 10:00 | Funding, rate +0.0100% | 2 | $101 oracle | −$0.0202 | Funding |
| 11:00 | Funding, rate +0.0125% | 2 | $102 oracle | −$0.0255 | Funding |
| 12:00 | Funding, rate −0.0050% | 2 | $99 oracle | +$0.0099 | Funding |
| 12:40 | Sell 1 at $103 | 1 | $103 fill | +$3.0000 | Realized PnL |
| 12:40 | Fee on that fill | 1 | $103 fill | −$0.0515 | Fee |
| 12:50 | Withdrawal | 1 | — | −$50.0000 | Transfer |
| 12:55 | Mark the open unit | 1 | $104 mark | +$4.0000 | Unrealized, not cash |
Each funding amount is 2 × oracle price × rate, paid by the long when the rate is positive: 2 × $101 × 0.0001 = $0.0202, and so on. The third rate is negative, so the long receives.
Now reconcile. Realized price PnL is +$3.0000. Fees total −$0.1515 and funding nets to −$0.0358, so realized net is +$2.8127. Unrealized PnL at the $104 mark is +$4.0000. Net transfers are +$950.0000. Adding them gives $956.8127, which is the account value at 12:55.
The balance fell by $43.19 from the deposit, yet the trading lines show a small realized gain and a larger, still uncertain mark-based gain. If the mark moved to $99 before the remaining unit closed, the unrealized line would become −$1.0000 and the story would change again. That is why the categories stay apart.
Reconcile to the records you can verify
A tidy spreadsheet is only as good as its sources. Match each line to an account statement, fill history or settlement record. For on-chain deposits and withdrawals, keep the network, asset and transaction hash for each transfer, remembering that a hash identifies a transaction rather than proving everything about it. The guide to records worth keeping from the start also explains why secrets never belong in finance files.
Tax treatment of realized gains, fees and funding varies by jurisdiction and is outside the scope of this article; check local rules or a qualified adviser.
SuperQuant is a research workspace: its included examples use synthetic hourly data, it does not place live orders, and it does not read exchange balances or verify live execution. Its paper records are simulations, so label them that way in any review.
Keep learning
The evidence-first study sequence for beginners and the guide to a research journal that keeps uncertainty visible show how to record what you knew and when. To turn this ledger into a routine, pair it with the crypto trading journal. This is educational research context, not investment advice.