What is break-even?
The price this position has to reach for you to walk away flat — your average cost per share.
The price this position has to reach for you to walk away flat — your average cost per share.
Break-even, explained
Break-even is the price where a position is worth exactly what you paid for it: sell there and you neither made nor lost money on the trade itself. It sits at your average cost per share, so adding to a position at a higher price lifts it and adding lower drops it. On a price chart the journal draws it as a dashed line, which makes the whole question visual — everything above the line is profit, everything below it is loss. Fees and commissions are not in the line, so a true wash sits a little above it.
A worked example
You bought 50 shares at $400 and 50 more at $440. Break-even is $420 — the average, not the last price you paid.
Where break-even shows up in a journal
A trading journal is where this stops being a definition and becomes your own number. sizeforzero computes it from the trades you import or log, alongside the rest of your analytics vocabulary, and every figure in the app carries an (i) that explains it in the same plain English you just read.