Broker P&L mismatch
Last updated 3 September 2026
What does the "Broker P&L mismatch" email mean?
- Your broker sent a profit or loss figure that did not match the live market price. We spotted it and used our own figure instead.
- Your screen shows the corrected number. If your account uses risk management, your stop-loss and target also ran on the corrected number.
- You do not need to do anything. This is a problem at the broker's end, not with your trades or your orders.
- It usually clears on its own within a few minutes, once the broker starts sending correct data again.
- Other contracts in the same account may be affected too. They are all handled the same way.
- If your broker's own app shows a strange profit or loss around this time, this is the reason.
When this happens
- 1 The broker measured your position against yesterday's closing price instead of the live price.
- 2 The broker sent a price that had stopped updating, so the profit or loss was worked out from an old value.
- 3 The broker sent a zero or an incomplete figure for the position.
- 4 Broker systems can be briefly out of step with the market, most often in the first few minutes after the market opens.
What this email means
We read your positions from your broker many times through the day. Along with each position, the broker sends us its own profit or loss figure for it.
Sometimes that figure does not match the live market price of the contract. When the gap is too large to be normal, we stop believing the broker’s number and use our own instead.
This email tells you that it happened on your account. It is sent to you when your account uses Risk Management, because that is where a wrong number could have cost you money. Our support team always gets a copy.
Why a broker’s profit or loss can be wrong
The profit or loss on an open position is simply the difference between the price you traded at and the price the contract is worth right now. If a broker uses the wrong “right now” price, the figure comes out wrong.
The usual reasons are:
- The broker used yesterday’s closing price instead of today’s live price.
- The broker used a price that had stopped updating.
- The broker sent a zero or an incomplete figure.
This is most common in the first few minutes after the market opens, when broker systems are still catching up. On a day where prices open far away from yesterday’s close, the difference can look very large.
How we spot it
We know the live market price of every contract you hold. So we can work out the profit or loss ourselves and compare it with the figure the broker sent.
If the two cannot be explained by normal price movement, we treat the broker’s figure as unusable and use ours.
We only run this check on positions you opened today. For a position you are carrying from an earlier day, your broker may correctly measure from yesterday’s close, so a difference there is normal and expected. You can read more about that in Why is AT PnL different from M2M?.
Does this affect my stop-loss or target?
No. Your risk management runs on the corrected number, not on the broker’s figure.
This matters, because a wrong profit or loss figure could otherwise make an account look like it had hit a daily loss limit when it had not.
What is in the email
The email shows, for one contract:
- the live market price,
- the price your broker used,
- the profit or loss your broker sent, and
- the profit or loss at the live price.
The “price your broker used” is the useful one. It usually shows straight away what went wrong — for example, it may be exactly yesterday’s closing price.
If more than one contract in the account is affected at the same time, the email names only one of them. All of them are handled the same way. To keep your inbox clear we send at most one of these emails per account per hour.
Do I need to do anything?
No. The correction is already done.
If you see a strange profit or loss in your broker’s own app or terminal around the same time, this email is the reason for it. That figure is the broker’s, and it is the one we ignored.
Our support team gets a copy of every one of these emails and raises the problem with the broker.
