Instrument and money terms

A price difference is not money until you know what the contract is worth. This article covers the contract side of that — what Alltra knows about an instrument — and the money side, which is one deliberately narrow set of rules applied everywhere.

Naming an instrument

• Instrument — the canonical contract in Alltra’s catalogue, carrying its own specification. Your broker’s raw symbol is an alias pointing at one of these, never the thing itself.
• Symbol — the contract’s own code, expiry included — ESU26, ESZ26, ESH27.
• Symbol root — the rollover-safe grouping key. All three of those carry the root ES, which is what lets a breakdown by symbol survive a quarterly roll instead of splitting one instrument into four.
• Asset class — one of seven — forex, futures, equity, index-cfd, crypto, metal, energy.
• Market type — a second, separate axis — futures, stocks or options — which decides how P&L is priced. It is deliberately empty for a forex or metal row, because neither has an honest value for it.
• Quantity label — what one unit is called for this instrument: Contracts, Shares, Lots, or plain Quantity. It is why the Add Trade drawer relabels its own field when you pick a symbol.

The contract specification

• Tick size — the smallest price increment the contract trades in — 0.25 on ES, 0.01 on crude.
• Tick value — what one tick of movement is worth per contract in money — $12.50 on ES, $5.00 on NQ.
• Point value — cash per 1.00 of price movement per contract. It is derived as tick value divided by tick size wherever both exist, so the two can never disagree, and it is stored directly only where there is no meaningful tick grid at all.
• Contract multiplier — dollars per 1.00 of premium per contract — 100 on SPX and NDX. This is the options figure, and Alltra refuses to price an option without it rather than assuming the usual 100.
• Pip size — 0.0001 on most forex majors and 0.01 on the yen crosses. Assuming four decimals everywhere is wrong by a factor of a hundred, and silently.
• Off-tick price — a price that is not a whole multiple of the tick size. It is refused with the tick named, because a price that cannot have traded produces a result that cannot have happened.

A handful of the futures contracts carry exchange-published specifications: ES at 0.25 and $12.50 a tick, NQ at 0.25 and $5.00, YM at 1 and $5.00, RTY at 0.10 and $5.00, MES at 0.25 and $1.25, crude at 0.01 and $10.00, gold at 0.10 and $10.00, and micro gold at 0.10 and $1.00. Those are what a trade priced in Alltra is multiplied through, so a figure can always be checked by hand.

How a price difference becomes money

There are exactly three ways Alltra prices a closed trade, chosen by the instrument rather than by the account. Knowing which one applies is usually enough to work out why a figure is what it is.

• Futures — the price move divided by the tick size, multiplied by the tick value, multiplied by the quantity. Never a plain price difference — on ES that would be wrong by a factor of fifty.
• Options — the price move multiplied by the quantity and by the contract multiplier.
• Notional — the price move multiplied by the quantity, and by the point value where one exists. For a share that multiplier is 1, so the arithmetic is what you would do in your head.

The Add Trade drawer prints the calculation it is doing as a line beneath the figure — 2 Contracts × 14.0 Ticks × $12.50 — so it is always visible which of the three you got and what it multiplied through. It shows the size of the move rather than its direction; the sign belongs to the result.

Costs

• Commission — what your broker charges to execute. It is a field of its own on a trade.
• Fees — everything else that is deducted — clearing, exchange and regulatory. Also its own field.
• Total fees — those two added together. It is the single cost figure the Trades table shows in one cell, and net P&L is gross minus this.
• Reported and computed — where a cost came from. A fee your broker reported is stored exactly as reported and is never rounded, re-based or "corrected" against Alltra’s own schedule — the broker debited the account, and a schedule is only an opinion about what it should have been. A CSV or a hand-typed trade reports nothing, so the cost is computed from the account’s fee schedule instead and the row records that it was computed rather than reported. That record is not surfaced anywhere you can read today — no response carries it and no column shows it — so treat it as how the number was produced rather than as something you can check on screen.

The registry’s own wording for the combined figure is worth quoting, because it explains why it gets its own tile at all: already deducted from net P&L, shown separately so the cost of trading is visible. For a high-frequency approach it is often the largest single line in the account.

How money is stored and sent

• Minor units — whole cents. Every money figure travels as an integer beside its currency rather than as a decimal, because a fraction that is off by a hundredth only sometimes is the hardest kind of error to find.
• Currency exponent — how many minor units make a major one. It is 2 for most currencies, 0 for the yen and the won, and 3 for a handful including the Kuwaiti dinar — so "cents" is not a safe assumption and the exponent travels with the figure.
• Rounding — half away from zero, applied exactly once at the boundary. It is symmetric about the sign, which is the property a signed P&L needs; banker’s rounding would make a column’s total disagree with the sum of its rows.
• Base currency — the single currency your figures are stated in.
• Cross-currency — what happens when a total would span two currencies: Alltra refuses the sum rather than converting. A list of trades in two currencies is fine — each row carries its own — but a single figure adding them would have no meaning.

Two typographic details follow from this and are intentional. A negative figure uses a true minus sign rather than a hyphen, so a column of numbers aligns; and currency renders as $ rather than US$. Neither is decoration — both come from formatting money in one place instead of thirty.