Stock average & break-even
Work out your new average buy price after adding to a position, and the exact move it then takes to break even — before you decide whether averaging down is a plan or a reflex.
Runs entirely in your browser — nothing you type is sent anywhere. Educational only, and not investment advice.
How to use this calculator
Each step names a control you will find on screen above.
- First: quantity and price
Your existing holding — how many shares you already own and the average price you paid for them.
- Second: quantity and price
The purchase you are adding: how many more shares, and at what price. Lowering the price here is averaging down; a higher price is averaging up.
- Current market price
Where the stock trades now. This drives the live profit-or-loss and the break-even figures, so set it to the real price to see where you actually stand.
- Read the new average and the break-even move
The new average is your blended cost. The read-out then tells you the percentage the price must rise from here just to get back to that average — the number that shows what averaging down really commits you to.
Worked example: Averaging down a position that fell 20%
You hold 100 shares bought at ₹500. The stock has dropped to ₹400 and you buy 100 more there. It now trades at ₹430.
What to enter
- First: quantity
- 100
- First: price
- ₹500
- Second: quantity
- 100
- Second: price
- ₹400
- Current market price
- ₹430
What it shows you
- New average
- ₹450
- Total quantity
- 200 shares
- Total invested
- ₹90,000
- Unrealised P&L
- −₹4,000
- Move to break even
- ≈ 4.7%
(100×500 + 100×400) ÷ 200
200 × ₹430 = ₹86,000
₹430 → ₹450
Where this is taught
A calculator gives you a number. These explain what the number means and when it misleads you.
- Risk & Psychology13 minAdding to something you already ownAveraging down and adding to a winner are opposite decisions behind the same button. What a top-up changes, what it cannot change, and the size rule that settles both.
- Technical Analysis12 minScaling in, pyramiding and partial exitsEntering and exiting in pieces changes your average price, your risk and your psychology. Which of those changes help, and which quietly turn a winner into a loser.
- Risk & Psychology13 minThe decision still sitting in your notesOn a Sunday in April you finish an annual report and write one line: buy this, ₹20,000. You act on it on the fifteenth of the following month, at a price 19 per cent higher, without rereading anything — because the decision was already made. The conclusion survived the six weeks. Everything that produced it did not.
- Risk & Psychology11 minAfter a big lossThe decisions taken in the weeks after a serious loss usually cost more than the loss itself. What to do first, what to avoid, and how to come back properly.
- Risk & Psychology11 minAfter a long run of being rightA losing streak makes people cautious, which is protective. A winning streak makes them certain, which is not — and nobody looks for the problem while it is working.