Estimate the full round-trip cost of a PSE trade and your net profit or loss.
Net profit or loss
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Buy fees
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Sell fees
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Net proceeds
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The friction nobody quotes you on the ticket
The price you see on the PSE board is not the price you transact at. Every buy and every sell drags a small bundle of charges with it, and because they are percentages of your trade value, they scale up as you trade larger. This calculator stacks all of them for a complete round trip, a buy followed by a sell, so you can see the real profit or loss after the market, your broker, and the Bureau of Internal Revenue have each taken their cut.
Five charges are in play. On both sides of the trade you pay your broker's commission, 12 percent value-added tax on that commission, a PSE transaction fee, and an SCCP clearing fee. On the sell side only, one more charge appears: the stock transaction tax, which this calculator applies at 0.6 percent of the gross selling price. That sell-side tax is the single largest line in most round trips, and it is charged whether your trade made money or lost it.
A PHP 100,000 buy and PHP 110,000 sell
Work the tool's defaults at a 0.25 percent commission rate. You buy PHP 100,000 of shares and later sell them for PHP 110,000, a PHP 10,000 gross gain on paper. The buy carries about PHP 295 in fees: PHP 250 commission, PHP 30 VAT on that commission, and roughly PHP 15 of combined exchange and clearing fees. The sell carries about PHP 985, where the 0.6 percent transaction tax alone, PHP 660, dominates. After everything, your net profit lands near PHP 8,721, not the PHP 10,000 the price move suggested. The fees, all figures rounded to the nearest peso, total about PHP 1,280 for the round trip.
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Why small trades bleed proportionally more
Run the percentages and a round trip costs you somewhere around 1.5 percent of your trade value before you have made a single peso. That is the figure that should sit in the back of your mind: a stock has to climb past roughly 1.5 percent just for you to break even on a quick in-and-out. Day-traders and scalpers feel this brutally, because they pay it on every single round trip.
The minimum commission this tool cannot show
There is a floor the calculator does not model. Most PSE brokers charge a minimum commission per order, often around PHP 20, regardless of how small the trade is. On a PHP 1,000 trade that minimum can swamp the percentage entirely, pushing your real cost well above the 0.25 percent rate you entered. A practical tip follows directly: avoid tiny orders. Buying PHP 1,000 of a stock five separate times costs far more in minimum commissions than buying PHP 5,000 once. Batch your buys so the percentage commission, not the floor, is what you actually pay.
One caution on the figures. The broker commission rate, the exchange and clearing fees, and the transaction tax are set by your broker, the exchange, and the BIR respectively, and they are revised from time to time. The fee rates this calculator applies are reasonable current assumptions for illustration, but check your own broker's published schedule and confirm the transaction tax with the BIR before relying on a precise break-even.
Are these fees the same at every PSE broker?
The exchange transaction fee, the SCCP clearing fee, and the 0.6 percent transaction tax are the same regardless of which broker you use, because they are set by the exchange and the government. The broker commission is the part that varies. Online discount brokers tend to advertise around 0.25 percent, while full-service brokers may charge more. The minimum commission per order also differs, so compare both the rate and the floor when you choose a platform.
Do I still pay fees if I sell at a loss?
Yes. The commission, VAT, exchange fee, and clearing fee all apply on a losing sale, and so does the 0.6 percent transaction tax, because that tax is charged on the gross selling price rather than on any gain. Selling at a loss therefore costs you the loss plus the full sell-side fee stack, which is why this tool can show a net loss larger than the raw price difference.