You buy something for 100 and sell it for 200. On paper you are delighted with a 100% profit. In reality, you may already be running into a loss, not just on this transaction but on the customer, the vendor or even the market segment as a whole.

The problem is simple. Businesses often look at selling price minus purchase price and call that profit. But in a real business environment, cost is far more complex. Let us look at where the illusion of profit disappears.

There is a common but deeply flawed belief in business that the selling price of a stock item should be based on its cost price. While this may appear logical at first glance—after all, one must recover what was spent—it is often a dangerous approach that leads to lost opportunities and, in many cases, actual losses.