Subtle & customizable audible cues to indicate when charts turnover, plus world clocks for any market — by & for professional traders
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Subtle & customizable audible cues to indicate when charts turnover, plus world clocks for any market — by & for professional traders
Open the appGuidance last reviewed 2026-09-01
Every number in Chart Ding is arithmetic on a file your broker gave you. There is no market data behind it, no estimate, and nothing fetched from anywhere to fill a gap.
That means each figure can be traced back to a row in your own export — and this page is that trace. It exists because a number you cannot check is a number you should not trust, including ours.
| Trades from fills | Your broker exports executions; we assemble round trips |
| Fees | Taken from the file, never inferred |
| Options | ×100 unless the contract says otherwise |
| Futures | The contract multiplier, and what happens when we cannot establish it |
| Currencies | Never added together; conversion is a labelled view |
| Dates and times | Read from the file, and asked about when genuinely ambiguous |
| What we refuse to show | Every place we print nothing rather than a guess |
Brokers export executions — individual fills. Traders think in trades. Turning one into the other is the single conversion everything else sits on.
We walk each instrument's fills in time order and close a trade when the position returns to flat. One buy of 300 and three sells of 100 is one trade, not four. A position taken to flat and reopened in the same minute is two trades, not one.
Two consequences worth knowing:
Where an export already carries the broker's own position or ticket id — MetaTrader does — we use it rather than inferring the pairing, because the broker recorded a fact we would otherwise be guessing at. That matters on platforms which let you hold a long and a short in one symbol at the same time, where pairing by netting would make both disappear.
Fees come from the file. Where a broker publishes a split — commission separately from regulatory and exchange fees — we keep the split. Where a broker publishes one combined figure, we show one combined figure.
We never divide a combined number into parts. An invented commission figure would look exactly like a real one, and it would end up being used to compare brokers or to decide whether a strategy pays for itself.
If your export has no fee column at all, fees read as zero and the screen says the file did not include them. That is a different statement from a broker who charges nothing, and the two are never conflated.
An option's value moves in contracts, not shares. A contract on 100 shares priced at $2.90 costs $290, and a ten-cent move is $10 rather than ten cents.
We take the multiplier from the contract itself. An option symbol is self-identifying — it carries an expiry, a strike and a call/put marker, three things a stock symbol never has — so AAPL 2026-10-16 165 CALL is read as an option at ×100 without anyone having to tell us.
Two cases handled deliberately:
/ES … 6500 CALL is ×50, not ×100. Equity treatment would be wrong by a factor of two on ES and ten on crude oil.⚠️ An option that expired is the one case we cannot finish alone. Where a broker's export records the expiry — several do — we use it. Where it does not, the position stays open in our books rather than being closed at a value we invented: whether an option expired worthless or was exercised changes the answer completely, and only you know which happened.
A futures contract carries a multiplier too, and it varies by instrument: MES is ×5, MNQ is ×2, gold is ×10. We hold a table of the common ones and read it from the symbol.
Where a broker states an amount we can check against, we derive the multiplier from their own arithmetic instead of trusting our table. Their figure beats ours.
Where we cannot establish one, we say so on screen and ask, rather than quietly defaulting to 1. A wrong multiplier is worse than none: ×1 on a contract that is really ×50 understates every result by fifty times, plausibly and without complaint.
We never add two currencies together. If a statement contains both — Interactive Brokers reports a currency per row, so this is common — the totals that would combine them are not shown until you pick a currency to view in.
Where a file states its currency, that wins. Where it does not, an account setting fills the gap, and below that a display default you control. Every rung is something you can see and change.
Conversion is available as a clearly-labelled view, and the detail — which rate, which date, and why a converted total will not match a currency converter — has its own page: How we convert currencies.
Dates are read as written. A four-digit year first is unambiguous. A month spelled out is unambiguous.
03/04/2026 is not. If anything else in that column settles the order — a single 15/04 proves the day comes first, because there is no fifteenth month — we apply that reading to the whole column. Only when nothing in the file can settle it do we ask, and we show you a real date from your own file when we do.
This is not cosmetic. Trades are paired by walking fills in time order, so reading the column the wrong way does not mislabel trades — it builds the wrong ones, out of fills that never belonged together.
Times are used exactly as given and never invented. Some exports carry no time of day at all. Where that happens, holding times, hour-of-day and session breakdowns are not shown, and the screen says why rather than drawing a chart out of midnight.
Gathered in one place — every figure we deliberately leave blank rather than estimate:
Each of these would be easier to fill in than to leave blank, and each would look better filled in. A gap that explains itself is worth more than a number that cannot be defended.
If a figure here disagrees with your broker's own statement, your broker is right and we want to hear about it.
Every reconciliation we run matches the file's own stated totals to the cent — Schwab, thinkorswim, MetaTrader 4 and 5, DAS Trader. The ones that did not match, at some point, are the reason several of the rules on this page exist.
Chart Ding is a market clock with customizable alarms for traders — candle-close alerts, world market sessions, and holiday warnings. Open the app.
Nothing on this website is trading or investment advice. Chart Ding is a market clock and alarm tool — it does not recommend trades, evaluate strategies, or take account of anyone's circumstances. Nothing here should be construed as a recommendation or relied on as the basis for a trading decision. Consult a licensed professional before placing real money at risk. Trading involves risk of loss.