Record Keeping and Reporting

Trading records serve two audiences that want different things. The journal from Track 7 is for you, and it is about reasoning. The records in this lesson are for anyone who might later ask what happened — a tax authority, an accountant, a prop firm, your future self reconstructing a year — and they are about money and evidence.

The two overlap enough that keeping both is less work than it sounds, and the second set is the one people wish they had started earlier.

What to keep and for how long

The general principle: keep anything you would need to reconstruct the year from scratch if the broker's platform disappeared tomorrow. Brokers do close, and access to historical statements is not guaranteed once an account does.

• Download monthly, not annually. A platform that loses access to older data, or a broker that closes your account, takes the records with it.
• Keep the raw export, not just a spreadsheet you built from it. The raw file is the evidence; your spreadsheet is an interpretation of it.
• Store it somewhere that survives a laptop failure — and keep a copy outside the broker's platform, which is the single point of failure this whole section is about.
• How long depends entirely on where you live. Retention requirements vary widely; the last section of this lesson is about that.

Reconciling to statements

Reconciliation means checking that your own records agree with the broker's. It sounds clerical and it catches real problems, some of them expensive.

1. Trade count. Does your journal hold the same number of closed trades as the statement? A gap means trades you did not record, which is usually the ones you would most want to review.
2. Net result. Does your journal's total match the statement's, after fees? A persistent gap means costs you are not counting in your expectancy.
3. Deposits and withdrawals. Does the balance change equal result plus deposits minus withdrawals? If not, something is unexplained.
4. Swap and commission. Are the charges what you expected from Track 2's measurements? This is where a change in broker conditions shows up first.

Do it monthly, in the same session as the last weekly review of the month. Ten minutes, and it answers a question no amount of journalling can: whether the numbers you are making decisions from are the real ones.

Separating the accounts

Keep trading money separate from living money, with a dedicated bank account between your household and the broker.

• It makes the records trivially clear. Every transaction in that account is trading-related, so there is nothing to disentangle later.
• It makes position sizing honest. Track 5's rules size from the trading balance, and mixing accounts blurs what that balance actually is.
• It prevents the worst decision in trading — topping up a losing account from money that was for something else. A separate account makes that a deliberate transfer rather than an invisible slide.
• It makes withdrawals real. Money moved out to the household account is money the trading process produced, and lesson 5 argues for doing that regularly.

Deciding the trading capital

1. Decide the total you are willing to lose entirely, as a one-time decision.
2. Move it to the trading account and stop. Additions are a decision made once a year, not in response to a drawdown.
3. Keep several months of living costs outside it, untouched by anything trading does.
4. Write down the rule for adding, so that adding during a drawdown requires overriding something you wrote when calm.

When to ask a professional

How trading profits are treated varies enormously by country, and within a country by whether you trade as an individual or a business, how often you trade, and which instruments. Some places treat it as capital gains, some as income, some differently again for leveraged products, and some not at all.

This site cannot tell you which applies to you, and neither can a forum. The answer depends on your residence, your circumstances, and rules that change.

What to bring when you ask

1. The statements and exports for the period.
2. The broker's legal entity and jurisdiction, from Track 2's lesson 5 — this frequently matters more than the brand.
3. Your deposit and withdrawal history.
4. How many trades, over how long, since frequency affects classification in several jurisdictions.
5. Whether this is your main income or secondary, which also affects it in many places.

Going in with those five prepared turns a long and expensive conversation into a short one. And the reason this lesson sits in the professional-practice track rather than being skipped is simple: the records have to exist before the question is asked, and the moment you need them is the moment it is too late to start keeping them.