Last updated: 12 Oct 2026 · 10 min read
By Pulkit Mangal — F&O trader since 2017, founder of TradeDiary. Past trading experience across Zerodha, Kotak and Dhan; built TradeDiary after losing ₹14L in 2021 to mistakes a journal would have caught.
TL;DR: A P&L figure is only as good as where it came from. To verify one — yours or anyone else's — rebuild it from the broker's own records (contract notes, the tradebook, the exchange's trade alert emails), settle every expired contract at its real settlement value, value open positions at the exchange's official closing price, and reconcile the difference line by line until it is zero. A screenshot proves nothing on its own; an unbroken, broker-sourced record over a period the trader did not choose after the fact proves a lot.
A Telegram channel posts a screenshot: +₹1,84,000 this week, green numbers, a broker's logo in the corner. Your own spreadsheet says you made ₹84,300 last quarter, and your broker's report says ₹62,101. Which of those numbers is true? Possibly all three — and possibly none of them means what it seems to.
"P&L" sounds like one number. In practice it is a set of choices: which period, before or after charges, booked or including open positions, at which price. Verifying a P&L means pinning down those choices and checking the figure against records nobody involved can edit.
💡 Short on time? Try the free F&O journal — import your broker statement and it rebuilds your P&L from every fill, with charges and expiries settled.
1. What "how to verify trading P&L" actually means
There are two different jobs hiding behind the question:
- Verifying your own P&L — making sure your journal, your spreadsheet and your broker agree, so the number you analyse (and the one you file tax on) is right.
- Verifying someone else's P&L — deciding whether a screenshot, a course seller's "track record" or a friend's claim reflects what actually happened in their account.
Both come down to the same test: can the figure be rebuilt from records the trader cannot alter? In India those records are the broker's contract notes, the tradebook, the ledger, and the exchange's own end-of-day trade emails.
Three things about Indian F&O make this harder than it sounds:
- Charges are large relative to profit. STT on options is 0.15% of sold premium since 1 April 2026, and brokerage, exchange charges, GST and stamp duty sit on top. A "gross" P&L and a "net" P&L can differ by a quarter or more of the profit.
- Expiries settle without a trade. An option you let expire never shows an exit price you typed. It settles at intrinsic value (or zero), and stock options are physically settled — so a journal that simply "forgets" expired positions is wrong in a way that is hard to spot.
- "Today's P&L" depends on which price you use. After the close, a broker's screen typically values open positions at the last traded price. The exchange's official closing price is a different number — and it is the one most brokers carry your position forward at the next morning. More on this, with real data, in section 5.
2. Why it matters for Indian traders
Screenshots are the currency of trading social media
A P&L screenshot can be cropped, picked from the one good week, or edited in a browser in under a minute. It also usually shows gross figures and nothing about the account's other weeks. SEBI has been tightening this space: amendments notified in August 2024 bar SEBI-regulated entities from associating with unregistered persons who make claims of returns or performance without SEBI's permission.
Even regulated advisers now need verified numbers
From 4 May 2026, SEBI's Past Risk and Return Verification Agency (PaRRVA) — CARE Ratings, with NSE as the data centre — verifies past performance that investment advisers, research analysts and algo providers want to use in advertisements. If a registered adviser needs an independent check before quoting returns, an unregistered stranger's screenshot deserves at least as much scrutiny.
Your tax return uses the broker's numbers, not your spreadsheet's
F&O income is non-speculative business income and is reported in ITR-3. Turnover, profit and every deduction should trace back to contract notes. If your journal says one thing and your broker's tax P&L says another, the journal loses — so find the gap before filing, not after a notice. (ITR-3 for traders covers the filing side.)
A wrong P&L teaches you the wrong lessons
If your records quietly drop charges or a few losing trades, every metric built on them — win rate, expectancy, drawdown — flatters you. You end up scaling a strategy whose edge exists only in the spreadsheet. SEBI's January 2024 study found that 9 out of 10 individual F&O traders lost money; a P&L you have not verified is one more way to believe you are the tenth.
3. What a verifiable P&L record contains
Whatever tool you use, a P&L you can defend has these fields — and every one of them traces back to a broker or exchange document:
| Field | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Period with a fixed start date | A record that starts after the losses proves nothing; the start must be fixed before results are known |
| Every fill, from the broker | Quantity, price, time and side from the tradebook or contract note — never typed from memory |
| Charges per trade | Brokerage, STT, exchange fees, SEBI fee, GST and stamp duty, from the contract note |
| Expiry settlements | Each expired contract closed at its settlement value, or at zero if it expired worthless |
| Open positions and their price | Unrealised P&L, and the exact price used — official close or last traded price |
| Account scope | Which accounts and segments are included, and that none were left out |
| Reconciliation status | Whether fills add up to the broker's position book every day, with gaps listed, not hidden |
Optional but useful: a hash or fingerprint of the underlying data, so anyone can tell whether it changed after publication.
4. How to verify a trading P&L, step by step
Verifying your own
- Fix the question. Choose the period (a quarter, a financial year), and decide: booked only, or booked plus open positions? Before or after charges? Most disagreements end here.
- Pull the broker's own report. Download the P&L or tax P&L report for exactly that period from your broker's back office. Use the file, not the app screen.
- Rebuild from fills. Take the tradebook or contract notes and, for each contract, add up sell value minus buy value. Every contract should either net to zero quantity or still be open.
- Add the charges from contract notes. Brokers issue a contract note within 24 hours of each trading day; the charges on it are the ones you actually paid and can claim. Cross-check them with the Indian brokerage calculator if a figure looks off.
- Settle every expiry. For each contract that reached expiry still open, apply the exchange settlement price: intrinsic value for in-the-money options, zero for the rest. Check the expiry date itself — monthly symbols carry no day, and a holiday moves the expiry to the previous trading day.
- Value open positions at the official close. Use the exchange's closing price from its daily bhavcopy, not the last traded price on your screen, and use the same convention at both ends of every period.
- Reconcile to zero. List every difference between your figure and the broker's until nothing is left unexplained. The NSE emails each investor's trades (price and quantity) at the end of every trading day to the address the broker registered — a useful independent check for trades you might have missed.
Checking someone else's
- Where did the number come from? A link generated by the broker or a verification service beats a screenshot every time. Zerodha's Console, for example, can publish a Verified P&L link straight from its back office.
- Who chose the period? Many shared reports let the trader pick the window and switch the link private later. Ask for the full financial year, or a record whose start date was fixed in advance.
- Is it net of charges? Gross P&L on a high-turnover options account can be wildly different from net.
- Does it include open positions? A week of booked profits can hide a large open loss.
- Is it the whole account — and all accounts? No single record can prove someone has no other account. Treat "one account, one good period" as exactly that.
- Are they selling something? If returns are being used to sell a course, signals or a strategy, check whether the person is SEBI-registered at all.
5. A real example with numbers
Take Arjun, 31, a software engineer in Hyderabad who trades NIFTY and SENSEX options with ₹4.5L of capital. For April to June 2026, his spreadsheet showed +₹84,300. His broker's P&L report, after charges, showed +₹62,101. He reconciled the gap line by line:
| Line | Amount | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Spreadsheet P&L (gross, entered by hand) | +₹84,300 | Arjun's own entries |
| Charges never entered | −₹14,812 | Contract notes: brokerage, STT, exchange and SEBI fees, GST, stamp duty |
| Two trades never entered | −₹6,945 | A stop-loss hit during a meeting, found in the NSE trade alert email |
| A short put logged as "expired worthless" | −₹442 | It expired 6.80 points in the money: 65 units × ₹6.80 |
| Broker's P&L report, net | +₹62,101 | Matches to the rupee |
More than a quarter of his "profit" was bookkeeping, not trading. The biggest line was charges, but the one that worried him was the missed stop-loss: his records showed a clean quarter because the worst afternoon was never written down.
The open-position trap, from real data
Booked P&L has one right answer. Day-to-day P&L on open positions does not — unless you fix the price. In TradeDiary's Verified P&L pilot we measured this on real Kotak Neo F&O accounts:
- On 9 Oct 2026, one pilot account's day MTM on the broker's screen after the close was ₹6,221 — valued at the last traded price of each contract.
- The same positions valued at the exchange's official closing price (from the NSE and BSE bhavcopy) came to ₹6,434 — ₹213 more.
- Across 5–9 Oct, in 129 of 129 cases the broker carried positions into the next day at the previous day's official close, not at the last traded price it had shown the evening before.
So if you add up daily MTM figures copied from a broker's after-close screen, the days do not chain: each morning starts from a slightly different price than the previous evening ended. Use the official close at both ends and they add up exactly — booked P&L plus the change in open-position value equals the sum of the days.
6. Common mistakes
- Comparing gross with net — always check whether a figure is before or after charges; on options, the gap is often 15–30% of profit.
- Letting expired positions vanish — settle each one at its settlement value, and check the expiry date was not moved by a holiday.
- Mixing booked and unrealised P&L — report them separately, and say which price the open positions are valued at.
- Trusting a screenshot of a hand-picked week — ask for a full financial year, or a record whose start date was fixed in advance.
- Typing trades from memory — import the tradebook or contract notes; a journal that misses one bad afternoon is wrong every day after.
- Rebuilding P&L with a tool that guesses — anything that guesses expiry dates, lot sizes or charges should show where each number came from, so you can check it.
7. How TradeDiary helps
TradeDiary imports broker statements and tradebooks — Zerodha, Upstox, Kotak, Dhan, Angel One and others — keeps every F&O fill once, settles expiries, and splits charges by head, so your journal P&L can be reconciled against the broker's report instead of argued with. For traders who want to publish a record, our Verified P&L builds a public page only from the broker's raw API data, stored so it cannot be edited and checkable on the verification page. It is a private pilot today, for Kotak Neo F&O accounts. For the bigger picture, see the trading journal India guide and Trader analytics 101.
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Frequently asked questions
How do I verify someone's trading P&L? Ask for a report generated by the broker or a verification service rather than a screenshot, covering a full period whose start was fixed in advance, net of charges and including open positions. Remember that one record covers one account; it cannot prove the trader has no others.
Is a P&L screenshot proof of trading profits? No. A screenshot can be cropped, edited or chosen from the one good week, and it rarely shows charges, open positions or the rest of the year. Treat it as a claim, not evidence.
Why doesn't my journal P&L match my broker's P&L? The usual causes are charges left out, trades never entered, expired options not settled, a different expiry date after a holiday, and open positions valued at a different price. Reconcile line by line using contract notes until the gap is zero.
What is the difference between booked P&L and MTM? Booked (realised) P&L comes from positions you have closed and does not change. MTM (mark-to-market) adds the paper gain or loss on open positions at a chosen price, so it changes every day and depends on whether you use the last traded price or the official closing price.
Can SEBI-registered advisers advertise their past returns? Only with verification. Since 4 May 2026, SEBI's Past Risk and Return Verification Agency (PaRRVA), run by CARE Ratings with NSE as the data centre, verifies past performance that investment advisers, research analysts and algo providers want to use in advertisements.
Risk disclaimer
Trading in derivatives carries substantial risk. SEBI's January 2024 study found that 9 out of 10 individual traders in the equity F&O segment lost money, with average losses of ₹50,000 over FY22. (SEBI study, 25-Jan-2024)
Sources: NSE's trade alerts facility for investors; Zerodha's support note on Verified P&L in Console; SEBI's operationalisation of PaRRVA (29 Apr 2026). The 9 Oct 2026 MTM figures come from one account in TradeDiary's Verified P&L pilot. TradeDiary is not a SEBI-registered investment adviser or research analyst. This article is general information, not investment or tax advice.
Pulkit Mangal trades F&O on Indian markets and builds TradeDiary, a trading journal made for the Indian F&O trader.
Last updated: 12 Oct 2026.