Statements and trade confirmations

Two documents describe what happened on a trading account, and they are frequently treated as one. A trade confirmation is a record of a single transaction, issued at the moment it occurred, and it is the definitive account of that one event. A statement is a record of everything that reached the account over a period, and it is the definitive account of the balance. Neither can substitute for the other, because a figure that is the whole point of one may not appear anywhere on the other.

Both are regulatory documents rather than conveniences. Firms are required to provide a prompt confirmation of each executed transaction and periodic statements of holdings and money, and the required content is specified rather than left to the firm. That is why they carry fields no dashboard displays: the dashboard shows what is useful now, and the documents record what is required to be recorded.

The fields that matter on a confirmation 

Most of a confirmation is unremarkable: instrument, direction, quantity, executed price, timestamp, transaction identifier. Three fields carry information available nowhere else, and they are the reason the document is worth opening.

• The requested price, alongside the executed price. The difference between the two is the only direct measurement of execution available to an account holder, and no screen displays it after the fact.
• The submission timestamp, alongside the execution timestamp. The interval between them is the round trip the order actually took, as opposed to the figure a firm publishes for its own infrastructure.
• The order identifier, where several fills belong to one submitted order. It is what makes a set of partial fills reconstructable into the single order they came from.

A partial fill produces one confirmation per fill, each with its own price and timestamp, all sharing an order identifier. The effective price of the whole is the quantity weighted average of them, and it appears on none of the confirmations individually. Reconstructing it is arithmetic the reader has to perform, and the identifier is what makes it possible.

How a statement is organised 

A statement is built around one identity that holds on every account: the closing balance is the opening balance plus everything that happened in between. Everything that happened in between falls into four categories, and a statement that does not separate them is difficult to reconcile.

1. Realised results from positions closed during the period, each attributable to a specific closing transaction.
2. Explicit charges, meaning commission and any conversion or account fee, each attributable to a specific transaction or date.
3. Financing entries posted at each daily rollover on positions that were open at the cut off, one per position per night.
4. Cash movements: deposits, withdrawals and any adjustment applied by the firm, including dividend and corporate action adjustments.

Unrealised results on positions still open at the end of the period are deliberately not in that list. They are not part of the balance, because nothing has settled. They appear separately as open positions with a mark to market valuation, and the balance plus that valuation is the account's equity. Conflating the two is the single most common misreading of a statement.

The gap between the last two rows is the useful part. An account that appears to have performed better than its balance suggests is usually carrying open positions, and the difference is unrealised rather than earned. It settles into the balance only when the positions close, at whatever prices they close at.

Why a hand calculation legitimately disagrees 

Four reasons account for almost every discrepancy between a figure worked out from a chart and the figure on a statement, and none of them is an error.

The first is the side of the quote. A position opens on one side of a two way price and closes on the other, so a calculation performed from a single price series will differ from the statement by roughly the spread. The second is currency conversion, where the instrument is quoted in a currency other than the account's: the statement shows the converted figure at the rate applied at that moment, and the rate is printed alongside it.

The third is the set of separate lines. Commission, financing and any adjustment are posted as their own entries rather than folded into the position's result, so a calculation of the position alone will not match the account's movement. The fourth is the trading day boundary: a trade closed after the daily cut off belongs to the following trading day on the statement even when the local calendar date is unchanged.

Why the records are worth keeping 

Firms are required to retain transaction records for a period set by their regulator, and platforms typically expose a shorter history than that. Exported confirmations and statements are the only copy an account holder controls, and they are the raw material for every measurement that cannot be taken from a dashboard: the distribution of price differences, the true cost of a period, and the proportion of orders that filled at all.

They are also the documents a tax position is prepared from in jurisdictions where one arises, and the format that matters there is the one with the realised results separated by date rather than the running dashboard. Both documents are available from within the trading platform itself, which for YAL accounts means MetaTrader 5.