Equity versus saldo: wat is het verschil in een tradingaccount?

What is the difference between equity and balance?

Balance is the cash in your trading account from closed trades only. Equity is what the account is actually worth at this second, which is your balance plus or minus the profit and loss of every position still open.

When you have no open positions, the two numbers are identical. The moment you open a trade, they separate, and the difference between them is the single most important number on your platform.

Why does equity move while balance stays still?

Because balance only updates when a trade closes, while equity updates with every tick. Your balance is history. Your equity is the present.

The formula your platform uses is simply:

Floating profit and loss is the unrealised result of open positions. If you are $300 down on an open gold trade, that $300 has already left your equity even though your balance has not changed by a cent. Traders who watch the balance figure feel fine right up until the position is closed for them.

Here is the same account at four moments in one day:

Notice that the balance did not move at all until the final row, while the account was genuinely worth $448 less for hours before that. Nothing in row three was hypothetical. That was real money, already gone, simply not yet recorded.

How do equity, margin and free margin fit together?

Equity is the numerator of the calculation that decides whether your broker closes your positions. The chain runs: equity divided by used margin gives the margin level, expressed as a percentage, and when that percentage falls far enough the broker acts.

The three related numbers are:

• Used margin — the deposit locked up to hold your open positions
• Free margin — equity minus used margin, the amount available for new trades or further losses
• Margin level — (equity ÷ used margin) × 100

Work it through. On a $10,000 balance with 0.20 lots of gold open at 20:1 leverage, gold at $2,400 means a notional value of 20 ounces × $2,400 = $48,000, so used margin is $2,400.

At the bottom row the account is in stop-out territory at most brokers, whose thresholds commonly sit between 20% and 100% margin level. The balance still reads $10,000 the whole way down. This is exactly the mechanism described in what a margin call really is, and the leverage that magnifies it is covered in how leverage actually works.

Which number should you manage your risk on?

Equity, always. Sizing a position off your balance while carrying open losses is how traders quietly double their real exposure without noticing.

Suppose your rule is to risk 1% per trade. With a $10,000 balance and two open positions floating at -$1,500, your equity is $8,500. A 1% risk is $85, not $100. Using the balance figure means you are risking 1.18% of the money you actually have, and that error compounds precisely when it hurts most, because open losses are largest during the exact periods you are most likely to be tempted into another trade.

There is a second reason. Drawdown, the number every serious performance record reports, is measured on equity, not balance. A balance-based curve can look perfectly smooth while the account is repeatedly close to a stop-out, because a position held at a large floating loss simply never appears. This is one of the standard ways a weak track record is made to look calm, and it is why drawdown should always be read as an equity figure.

A short set of rules that follows directly from all of this:

What is the TIC angle on equity vs balance?

The honest angle is that most blown accounts do not blow up on a single bad trade. They blow up because the trader was reading balance while the equity was telling a different story for days, and by the time the two numbers reconciled there was no room left to act.

It is also why performance should be judged on a verified equity curve rather than a screenshot of a balance. An equity curve exposes every open position that went badly before it was closed, which is precisely the information a balance figure hides. TIC publishes independently verified Myfxbook records for that reason, and you can inspect the equity curve at /results.

If you want the full picture, read this alongside how pips and lots translate into money, because the sizing arithmetic is what connects an equity number to a real position.