Where to start when something looks wrong

Almost every report that reaches us is one of four things, and telling them apart takes about ten seconds. It is worth doing first, because the four have nothing in common — one is a filter, one is a definition, one is a failed request and one is a figure nothing can compute yet.

Name what you are looking at

• Nothing where there should be something — a card in its own empty state, or a table saying it has no rows. Nothing failed — the page is describing a scope. Start with the account picker and the date range.
• Something, but the figures are wrong — the read succeeded and you disagree with the answer. That is a question about how the figure is defined or how the trade was built.
• A short panel carrying a “Reference” line — a read actually failed. It shows the service’s own sentence and a reference id, and that reference is the one thing that joins your screen to a log line. Home, Portfolio and Resources head it “Could not load this page”; in the Tracker it is headed with the section’s own name.
• An em dash where a number should be — not zero and not an error. It means the figure is not computable from what is there. Some are permanently em dashes today because nothing in the product computes them yet.

The ladder

1. 1Is there a DEMO badge in the top bar — Demo Mode replaces every figure with sample data. It is stored per browser, so it can be on at your desk and off on your laptop, and it does not turn itself off when your own data arrives. Two surfaces do not draw the badge, for opposite reasons: Alltra Home honours the switch but shows no stamp, so there the greeting is the tell — a name that is not yours means sample data. Intelligence is not governed by the switch at all, so nothing on it is ever sample data and there is nothing there to check.
2. 2Open Trading accounts and read the ticks — the account picker is a remembered preference. A row reads Active or Inactive by whether it is ticked, not by whether it is connected. The accounts button is in the top bar of every app except Alltra Home, and in the Portfolio it opens that app’s own platform drawer instead — so the ticks are edited from the Tracker. What they narrow is the Tracker and the answers Intelligence gives; the Portfolio counts platforms rather than accounts, and Home and Resources are deliberately unscoped.
3. 3Read the date range under it — the calendar button in the page toolbar, the second bar down. Also remembered, also shared. The default is month to date, so on the first of a month a dashboard is one day wide and looks empty for reasons that have nothing to do with your trades.
4. 4Check the page actually reads a range — eight sections do. Portfolio › Accounts, for example, describes what you hold rather than a window, so the date picker changes nothing there and is not meant to.
5. 5Reload once — these pages are rendered on the server, so a reload is a genuine re-read rather than a repaint. The “Try again” button on a failure panel does exactly this.
6. 6Then read the article for the shape you named — below. If you get to the end of one without an answer, that is when a ticket is worth writing.

What is never the cause

Narrowing a scope does not delete anything. The account picker, the date range and Demo Mode all decide what is being read; none of them writes, and none of them can remove a fill you already have. If a figure vanished, the data behind it did not.