How to read a broker statement line by line

A broker statement is the firm's list of what it says happened to one account during a period. It is a business document, closer to a bank statement than to a chart. The header identifies the account: a name or an account number, the account currency, the period the pages cover, and often the leverage or the account type. Check those before you read a single trade. A statement for the wrong account, the wrong month, or a currency you were not expecting will make every later total look mysterious. If you run more than one account, write the account number on your own notes the day you open it. Platforms reuse ticket numbers across accounts, and a journal that ignores the account will eventually join two unrelated rows. The header is also where you confirm the clock. If the statement says the history is in server time, a position that looks as if it closed "tomorrow" may have closed this evening in the place where you live.

Under the header, or in a separate section, you should find deposits, withdrawals, and other balance operations that are not trades. A deposit increases cash. A withdrawal decreases it. A credit, a bonus, a rebate, an inactivity fee, a correction, or a charge for a card transfer may sit in the same list with a different type label. Read the type. A credit that the firm can revoke is not the same as a bank transfer you made, even if both increase the running balance on the day they are posted. The running balance, if the statement shows one, is the easiest way to see the order of events. If it does not, you will reconstruct the order from timestamps. Either way, these cash rows are part of the identity that the whole statement must satisfy. They are easy to skip because they feel administrative. An account that received a large deposit in the middle of the month will show a higher end balance for a reason that has nothing to do with the trades, and a performance story that ignores the deposit is a story about the wrong object.

The closed-trades table is the center of most retail statements. A typical row carries a ticket number, an open time, a close time, a symbol, a direction, a volume, an open price, a close price, a commission, a swap, and a profit. Some firms omit columns and bury the missing amount inside profit. Some add a comment field that records a stop or a take-profit as the reason the close happened. Read the column headers on this statement, not the headers you remember from a previous firm. Then pick one row and retell it in a sentence: at this server time the account sold or bought this many units, at this open price, and at that later time the position was closed at that price, with this commission and this swap, for this profit in the account currency. If you cannot retell the row, a header still puzzles you. Stop there. The totals at the bottom are not a shortcut around a row you cannot read. They are the sum of rows, and a sum of misunderstandings is still a misunderstanding.

The profit figure has a formula, and checking one row against it is the best way to learn whether the figure is gross or net. For a buy of the base, the price result in the quote currency is about (close price minus open price) times the units of the base. For a sell of the base, the sign flips: (open price minus close price) times units. Commission usually reduces the result. Swap is added with its own sign, so a negative swap reduces it and a positive swap increases it. If the quote currency is not the account currency, a conversion rate stands between that result and the profit column. You may not see the conversion rate on the row. You can still ask whether the profit has the right sign and a plausible size. Use a round example only as a template for the check, not as a price from a market. A buy of 10,000 units, opened at 1.1000 and closed at 1.1020, has a price result of 200 quote-currency units before costs, because the price rose by 0.0020 and 0.0020 times 10,000 is 200. If the statement shows a profit near 200 minus a commission, in an account denominated in the quote currency, you understand the column. If it shows 200 and also shows a commission of 6, the profit column is probably gross and the cash effect is 194. The statement's change in balance is the authority that settles which reading is right.

Floating positions are a separate section, and they are why equity and balance diverge at the moment the statement is cut. Balance is the closed cash position. Equity adds the unrealized result of whatever was still open at the report time, often including swap already assigned. A statement prepared while a position is open can therefore show a healthy balance and a weak equity, or the reverse. The floating number is not money you can point to in a withdrawal. It is a mark. It will be replaced by a closed profit when the position ends, and the closed profit will use the future close price, not the mark on this page. When you file the statement, note whether anything was open at the cut. If you compare two statements, do not treat a change in equity as a change in closed performance. A position marked down on the 31st and closed on the 2nd moves the loss from one period's equity into the next period's closed trades. Counting it in both, or in neither, is the usual way to invent a month that the cash never had.

The identity that ties the document together is worth writing in the margin until it becomes automatic. Start with the balance at the beginning of the period. Add deposits, subtract withdrawals, and add every other balance operation with its sign. Add the closed-trade profits, using the definition you established: net, or gross plus the cost columns, but not both. You should land on the balance at the end of the period. Equity at the end equals that closing balance plus the floating result at the end. If your sum misses, the miss is information. A common miss is double-counting swap that is already inside profit. Another is forgetting a fee that was posted as a balance operation rather than as a trade. Another is including a floating loss as if it had already closed. Another is a correction posted after you exported the file, so that a second download no longer matches your spreadsheet. Find the row. Do not plug a rounding number and move on, unless the difference really is a penny of rounding, in which case say so in the margin. An unexplained difference of more than rounding means you do not yet know what the statement is counting.

Some lines look like trades and are adjustments. A "balance" row with no symbol, a swap credited as a cash booking rather than on the ticket, a dividend on a related product, or a cancelled trade that remains visible with a zero and a reversal row, can all disturb a naive sum. Read the comment field and the type field before you decide a row is a position. If a trade is reversed, both the original and the reversal belong in the sum; dropping the ugly one because it "did not really happen" will break the identity. The firm’s record is the record of what was posted. Your view that a fill was unfair does not remove the row. Disputes have their own correspondence. Until a correction appears as its own posted line, the original line is still part of the balance. Keeping the emails with the statement, labeled by ticket number, is how you remember which disputes were answered and which are only irritation.

File the statement in a way you can still open in five years. Download the PDF and, if it is offered, the CSV. The PDF is the paginated document with the header. The CSV is the one you can add up without typing. Store both, named with the account number and the period, in a folder that is not only the platform's inbox. Platforms change logins, firms merge, and history windows sometimes show only the last ninety days. A statement you did not download is a statement you are renting. While you are saving it, glance at the legal lines in the footer. They often state that the document is not a tax certificate, that complaints have a deadline, and that the governing complaint body is a named ombudsman or regulator. Those sentences do not change the arithmetic. They tell you what the document is for. It is an account of posted cash and tickets. It is not, by itself, a tax filing, a suitability letter, or a promise that the next period will resemble this one.

Reading well is mostly refusal. Refuse to treat the end balance as a grade. It includes deposits. Refuse to treat a closed-profit total as the whole cost if commission sits outside it. Refuse to average a few tickets into a "style" when the sample is a handful of rows and the sizes differ. Refuse to ignore the open positions at the cut. The statement will sit still while you do this. It does not need interpretation so much as it needs a reader who will perform the sum and keep the headers. Once the sum works, you know what the period did to the cash. You know which tickets contributed which amounts. You know what was still a mark when the page was printed. That knowledge is the entire usefulness of the document. It does not extend to a recommendation about the next order, and a firm that printed an accurate statement has not thereby printed a forecast. Accuracy about the past is the standard. It is a high enough standard that many readers never actually apply it.

This site does not produce broker statements, cannot correct a ticket, and does not hold the cash the statement describes. It is not a broker. A statement you have learned to read is still only the record of a period that is already over. Currency prices can wipe a deposit, and when they do, the wipe appears here as a closed loss, a stop-out, or a smaller balance, in ordinary type, without drama. The page is doing its job when it lets you see that. It is not doing a second job of telling you the next balance will recover.

This page is general information. It is not a policy, a diagnosis, a school place, or a trade.