FXCM Y/E Recon for Taxes

Hi jcl.

It's tax filing time .

I just finished reconciling Zorro's trades.csv to FXCM's Combined Account Statement for last year. For more than 1/3 of the records the Profit Zorro posted to trades.csv needed to be corrected. Rollover figures were all exact.

Is this as expected? That trades.csv is not an accurate record and needs this much fix-up to be correct?

Thanks.

trades.csv is an accurate record as to my knowledge.

However it is based on the trade profit retrieved from the broker's API, not on the FXCM account statement. Differences between the two may be due to account currency conversion or similar effects, but those differences should be very small.

Thanks jcl.

Not sure I understand what you're saying. Isn't the API returning Profit in the account's currency? I.e., already past any currency conversion...

(Not that FXCM's API can't have an error here too... )

However: I'm using USD. trades.csv has many Profit values that have more than 2 decimal places (i.e., sub-cents). Why would this be?

Thanks.

Yes, the API returns the profit in the account currency. It can apparently have more than 2 decimal places. I do not know the differences of FXCM's calculation of the profit in the account statement compared to the profit in the API, but a possible reason of small differences can be a different calculation method, a different currency conversion time, or simply a different rounding method.

Thanks jcl.

Hopefully this is an API bug that FXCM will fix someday... What they report in the API should match what appears on their Account Statements...

One other issue/question: The manual states the Profit in trades.csv includes Rollover. However, in my reconciliation to FXCM it does not. In other words, I had to add the Rollover in trades.csv to the Profit in trades.csv to equal the Net P/L in FXCM's Account Statement. Zorro's Profit in trades.csv equals the Gross P/L in FXCM's Account Statement. Could you please double-check the calculation of Profit in trades.csv vs. the manual?

Thanks.

Yes, AFAIK the listed profit does not contain rollover, which is listed separately. I'll check the manual.