Your Portfolio Says +30%. None of It Is Real Money Yet. Here's the Difference.
4 min read
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4 min read
Your app says you are up 30%. It is a real calculation on real prices. But until you sell, it is not money. It is an opinion the market currently holds about your holdings, and the market revises its opinions constantly.
The distinction between realized and unrealized gains sounds like accounting pedantry. It is not. It changes what you owe, what you can spend, and how much of that 30% you will actually keep.
An unrealized gain is profit on paper. You still own the asset. The gain exists because the current price is higher than what you paid, and it will keep moving every day the market is open. Some people call it a paper profit, or a floating profit.
A realized gain is profit you locked in by selling. The position is closed. The number stops moving. The money is yours.
(Current or sale price − Purchase price) × Quantity
Same formula, completely different status. One can evaporate overnight. The other cannot.
This is where Indonesia has a rule that catches people out.
Every share sale on IDX carries a 0.1% final income tax on gross proceeds, withheld automatically by your broker. Note the word gross. It is charged on the full sale value, not on your profit.
That means you pay it even when you sell at a loss. There is no "I lost money so no tax" here. The levy applies to the transaction, not the outcome.
| Amount | |
|---|---|
| Sale proceeds | Rp 100,000,000 |
| 0.1% final tax | Rp 100,000 |
| Brokerage fee (varies by broker, plus VAT) | broker specific |
| Net cash reaching you | under Rp 99,900,000 |
Founders selling shares obtained before an IPO face a higher rate, 0.5% of gross proceeds, rather than the standard 0.1%.
The 0.1% sounds trivial. On a single trade it is. The problem is that it applies every single time you sell.
Sell and rebuy twelve times in a year and you have paid the toll twelve times, plus twelve sets of brokerage fees, plus the VAT on those fees. A strategy that beats buy-and-hold by one percent before costs can easily lose to it after costs.
This is the quiet argument for holding. Not conviction, not discipline, just arithmetic. Every realization is a leak.
There is an opposite failure worth naming, because it costs people more than the tax does.
Unrealized gains feel like achievements. People check them, screenshot them, and grow attached to them. That attachment turns into a refusal to sell anything currently showing a paper profit, and an equally strong refusal to sell anything showing a paper loss, because selling would "make the loss real."
The loss is already real. Selling only changes whether you have acknowledged it. A position down 40% has already cost you that money; holding it does not undo the damage, it just defers the paperwork.
Decide what to hold based on what you think the asset is worth from here, not based on the colour of the number next to it.
Most broker apps blur them together into one headline figure. That is convenient and slightly misleading, because it invites you to treat a paper gain as spendable.
NetWort separates capital gain performance on the Gains page, which shows what you have actually made across sleeves and individual positions, alongside the split between what you deposited and what growth produced. That split matters: a portfolio that is up because you kept adding money is a different situation from one that is up because it appreciated, even when the totals match.
The same reasoning applies to your headline return percentage, which is why your broker's number and your real return often disagree.
Three practical habits.
Treat unrealized gains as provisional. When you plan around a number, use a conservative version of it, not the peak it touched last week.
Count the toll before you trade. Ask whether the move you are considering beats roughly 0.1% plus fees, per round trip, reliably enough to be worth it.
Never let the unrealized-versus-realized distinction drive the hold-or-sell decision. It is an accounting boundary, not investment information.
Open the Gains page and look at your realized figure next to your unrealized one. For most people the gap is larger than expected, and it is the honest picture of what the portfolio has actually delivered.