Trade and execution terms

Alltra does not store what a broker calls a trade. It stores the individual fills and derives trades from them, which is the single most important thing to understand about how any figure in the product is produced. The vocabulary below follows from that one decision.

The three layers

• Execution (fill) — the atom of the whole system — one account, one instrument, one side, a quantity, a price, a timestamp and its own fee breakdown. Executions are only ever added, never edited: a broker’s correction arrives as a new row pointing at the one it corrects.
• Order — a thin, optional grouping over the fills that share one broker order id. It exists so the interface can say "one order, filled in five parts" — no analysis is computed at this level.
• Trade — a derived position: a direction, an opened and closed time, an average entry and exit, the legs it was built from, and its realised result. Because it is derived, it can be deleted and rebuilt from the same fills without losing anything.

That last point is what makes a wrong trade a temporary state rather than permanent bad data. A late fill, a fee correction or a fix to the derivation marks the affected window and replays it, and because the derivation is a pure function of an unchanging set of fills, the replay always converges on the same answer.

Direction and status

• Long / short — the two directions. Buy and sell are normalised to long and short at the edge of the system, so no part of the calculation ever sees the raw words.
• Open position — a position with no exit fill yet. Nothing is realised, so it appears in the Trades table and in none of the performance figures.
• Partial — some of the position has been closed and some is still on. A partial exit does not close a trade, and a trade gets its closed time only once the position is flat.
• Still Open — the flag in the Add Trade drawer for a position you have not finished. Either your exit quantity matches your entry quantity, or you mark it Still Open — the drawer will not let a half-described close through as a complete one.
• Outcome — win, loss or breakeven, derived from the sign of the NET result. Exactly zero is a breakeven; an open trade has no outcome at all.
• Scratch — the product’s word for a breakeven trade. You will see it in "average hold (scratch)" and in the breakeven rate.

Building a position in pieces

Most real positions are not one entry and one exit. Alltra keeps the pieces as legs of one trade rather than as separate trades, which is what stops a scaled position from showing up as four unrelated results.

• Entry — the fill that opens the position — the move from flat to a position.
• Scale-in — a further fill in the same direction, adding to the position. The average entry price is recomputed as a quantity-weighted mean each time.
• Scale-out (partial exit) — a fill in the opposite direction, smaller than the position. It realises P&L on the quantity it matched and leaves the rest running.
• Final exit — the fill that returns the position to zero and closes the trade.
• Flip — a single fill large enough to close the position and open the opposite one. It is split at the zero crossing: the old trade closes exactly flat and a new trade opens with the remainder.
• Position Scaling — the Advanced Entry module in the Add Trade drawer, where a multi-leg position is typed in. Its two editors are Scaling In Entries and Scaling Out Exits.

Prices and quantities

• Average entry / average exit — quantity-weighted means across the legs on each side — not the plain average of the prices, which would let a one-contract fill count as much as a ten-contract one.
• Matched quantity — the smaller of what was opened and what was closed. P&L is priced on this rather than on the opened quantity, so a half-closed position reports half a result and not a whole one.
• Lot matching — which entry lot an exit is matched against — first in first out by default, with last in first out and weighted average available per account. The trade’s total is identical either way; what changes is the amount attributed to each partial exit, and that is the column you compare against a broker statement.
• Netting — one signed position per symbol, so a buy and a sell offset. Most futures accounts work this way.
• Hedging — simultaneous long and short tickets on the same symbol, which some MetaTrader accounts allow. Alltra tracks them separately rather than netting them to flat.

Which day a trade counts on

• Date basis — whether a date filter compares against the exit or the entry timestamp. Exit is the default, so a trade opened on the 30th and closed on the 1st counts against the 1st.
• Local trading date — the date a trade buckets to, resolved in the timezone saved on your profile rather than in UTC or in your browser’s. Note that "trading day" in the performance figures means something narrower — a day that carried at least one closed trade.
• Day key — the YYYY-MM-DD form a calendar cell, a journal entry and a daily report are all filed under. Every surface uses the same one, which is what stops the calendar and the report disagreeing about a day.

This is the most common cause of a trade appearing on a day you did not expect, and it is almost never a fault. Setting the timezone in Settings › Preferences correctly is what fixes it, because that one value decides the boundary every day-level figure in the product is cut on.

What you attach to a trade

• Strategy (setup) — the tagged approach behind a trade. It is a field on the trade and one of the axes performance can be broken down by.
• Tag — a label from your own vocabulary, grouped into categories. Tags are matched by their label rather than by an id, which is what lets one vocabulary serve both trades and the journal.
• Rating — a 0–5 star judgement of how you traded it. Unrated and rated zero are deliberately different states — one is a judgement you made, the other is one you have not.
• Risk plan — the stop and target you logged. It is what makes every R figure computable, and its absence is why an R column reads as an em dash.