What is Unrealized P&L?

Unrealized PnL is the profit or loss you would have if you closed a position at the current price, measured against what you paid for it. It exists only on paper: nothing has been sold, so nothing has been gained or lost in a way that can be spent or taxed, and the number changes with every price tick. A portfolio that shows a large unrealized gain has an asset that has risen, not money in the bank.

It is nevertheless the most-watched number in a tracker, because it is the live answer to the question of how the portfolio is doing. Computed honestly, it needs two inputs that are easy to get wrong: a current price from a real venue, and a cost basis that survives transfers between your own accounts. A tool that resets the cost of a coin every time it moves wallets will report unrealized gains that are fiction.

On leveraged positions the unrealized figure carries an extra weight, because it is also the distance to liquidation. A perpetual with a large unrealized loss is a position that is close to being closed by the venue, and the number should be read as risk before it is read as performance.

TrueHold shows unrealized PnL against a weighted average cost, with transfers between your own accounts treated as transfers, and on perpetuals it reads the mark price, funding and fees that make the real number differ from the position card.

The figure also depends on what price is used. A last-trade price on a thin market, a mark price on a perp venue and a floor price on an NFT collection are three different kinds of number, and an honest tracker labels which one a valuation rests on rather than presenting all of them as equally solid.