What account balance is

What the figure counts 

A deposit clears, and the balance rises by the amount that cleared. A position is opened, and the balance does not move. The price runs a long way in favour of that position, and the balance still does not move. It runs the same distance the other way, and the balance does not move then either. The position is closed, and only at that moment does the balance change, by the amount the closed contract produced. Nothing about the field is mysterious once that sequence has been watched once: it is the arithmetic total of finished events, in the order they finished.

Only four kinds of event reach it, and every one of them is a cash movement or a settled one.

• A deposit. Cash added to the account, credited when it has cleared rather than when it was sent.
• A withdrawal. Cash removed from the account, debited when it leaves.
• Realised profit or loss. The result of a position that has been closed, booked at the moment of closing and never before it.
• Charges and credits booked in cash. Commission, overnight financing adjustments, and any other fee or rebate provided for by the account's terms.

Nothing else touches it. An open position does not. A working instruction sitting on the book waiting for a price does not. A quote moving does not. This is why the profit and loss that reaches the balance is called realised: the word marks the moment an obligation was discharged in cash, and the balance records nothing until that moment arrives.

Why an open position leaves it alone 

The reason is structural rather than a display convention. A contract for difference settles one payment, and it settles it when the contract ends. While the contract is open no money is owed by either party yet, because the amount that will be owed is not yet fixed: it is a function of a closing price that has not happened. Accounting has a name for the distinction, and trading platforms inherit it. Settled transactions post to the ledger. Open obligations are valued, and a valuation is not a posting.

The running result of an open position is not hidden by any of this. It has its own field on the account panel, and the panel adds it to the balance to produce a second figure. That second figure is equity, and equity, not balance, is the number the platform's own margin arithmetic reads. Balance sits underneath it, flat, until a position closes and the two meet again.

The currency it is counted in 

A balance is a single figure in a single currency, the account's base currency, fixed when the account is opened. Instruments do not respect it. A contract written on a market quoted in another currency produces its result in that other currency, and the amount that posts to the ledger is the converted amount, taken at the rate prevailing at the moment of realisation rather than the rate on the day the position was opened. Two accounts holding identical contracts closed at identical prices can therefore post different balances, because they were denominated differently and converted at different rates. The mechanics of that conversion, and which instruments are affected by it, are set out in the guide to account base currency.

Where it appears on the account panel 

On both platforms YAL runs, MetaTrader 5, the account figures are printed together as a short group alongside the list of open positions: balance first, then the running result of anything open, then equity, then the margin fields that the rest of this module builds. Balance is conventionally the first of them because everything after it is derived from it. The exact wording of each label, and where the group sits in the interface, differ between the two platforms and between their desktop, web and mobile builds, so each platform's own documentation is the reference for its labels rather than any description written elsewhere.

The same figure appears in a second place, and comparing the two is the fastest way to confirm that the definition above is the one the platform is using. An account statement for a period opens with a balance brought forward, lists every posting in between, and closes with a balance carried forward. The closing figure is the opening figure plus the postings, and the statement will not reconcile if an unrealised valuation has been mixed in, which is precisely why the ledger keeps them apart.

Where practitioners disagree 

There is a long standing argument about which figure deserves to be called the size of an account, and it is not a semantic one. One tradition holds that balance is the only honest answer, because it is settled, auditable and reproducible from a statement, and because it does not flicker with every quote. The objection to it is exact: a balance ignores an obligation that already exists and that the platform is already testing, so an account described by its balance alone is described as though its open positions were not there. The other tradition holds that equity is the answer, because equity is what the margin arithmetic actually reads. The objection to that is equally exact: equity moves tick by tick, so any figure derived from it was true at a moment that has already passed. Both are right about a different question, which is why the disagreement has never resolved.

A second disagreement concerns what a balance history means. A balance that rose because cash was paid in did not rise because anything was traded, and a balance that fell because cash was taken out did not fall because a position lost. Performance measurement conventions in the fund industry adjust for cash flows for exactly this reason, and a raw balance history does not distinguish the two causes at all. The counter argument is that adjusting for cash flows produces a figure that no statement shows and no ledger holds, which makes it harder to check. Neither convention is more correct in the abstract, because they measure different things, and this page takes no position on which of them anybody should keep.