What is a trade's size across asset classes?
Table of Contents
This page is a capture in the inbox bucket of the product backlog — a pre-sprint idea, not yet pulled into a sprint as a story.
1. What
(One paragraph: the idea.)
2. Why
(Motivation, problem being solved, related context.)
3. References
4. See also
5. Why it is asked
The structure page was built to the prototype, and the prototype draws a notional for each leg of a deal. The implementation read it where it could be read and stated nothing elsewhere, which produced a column of dashes beside a few numbers — a screen that looks broken rather than one that is honest.
The reason is not a missing read. It is that the question has no single answer.
6. What the model holds, per family
| Family | Where the size lives | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Bond | bond_instruments.notional |
The face value held |
| Rate | swap_leg_amounts.amount, per leg and per period |
The notional of one leg; a swap has two, often equal, not always |
| FX | fx_*_instruments bought and sold amounts and currencies |
Two amounts in two currencies — there is no single number |
| Equity, credit, commodity | their own tables | Their own conventions |
A screen that states "notional" for all of them states the bond's convention for families that do not have it, and an FX trade has no answer at all.
7. The options
- State the size only where the family defines one, and leave the column out for the rest — which is what the page does today, and it reads as a fault.
- Name the family's own fact: "Face value" on a bond, "Leg notional" on a rate leg, "Bought / sold" on an FX trade. Honest, and a different column per family.
- State no size on the composition screens at all, and leave size to the instrument tabs a trade's own page already has. The composition screen is about what is grouped and how it confirms, and a size that means four things adds noise to that.
The page currently does (1); the proposal is (3), and (2) if a composition screen is ever meant to answer "how big is this deal".
8. What would settle it
A decision on whether the structure screen is about composition or about exposure. If it is about composition, the column goes; if it is about exposure, it needs a per-family vocabulary and probably a currency and a converted total, which is a report and not a column.