Deal ticket

The record produced when an instruction is executed. It names the instrument, the direction, the size in contracts, the price obtained, the moment it was obtained, any commission charged, and a reference number that belongs to that transaction and to no other. The name is inherited from paper: a dealing room wrote each transaction on a physical ticket, and the electronic record kept the word.

An order and a ticket are different objects, and confusing them is the usual trip. An order is an instruction that may sit unfilled, be amended or be cancelled, and it exists whether or not anything happens. A ticket exists only because something happened. One order can produce several tickets when it fills in parts, and a position opened and closed produces at least two, which is why a completed round turn appears twice in a history rather than once.

The timestamp on a ticket is the one the executing system recorded, not the moment a button was pressed, and the two differ by however long the message was in flight. That gap is where slippage lives, and the ticket is the evidence of it: the price on the ticket is what was received, and any question about what was executed and when is settled against the ticket rather than against a chart or a memory of the screen.