Currencies & the GBX case

Stretus settles in seven currencies. Six of them behave identically. The seventh, the London Stock Exchange, is the reason this page exists.

What each market settles in​

LSE quotes pence and settles pounds​

A London-listed share priced at 2450 is not £2,450. It is 2,450 pence, £24.50.

That single fact is the whole of it, and the distribution of the problem is what makes it dangerous: the factor is 1 at twelve of thirteen venues and 100 at the thirteenth. Code, a report or a spreadsheet built against any other market is correct, reviewed as correct, and wrong by exactly a hundredfold on LSE. And £24.50 rendered as £2,450.00 is not obviously absurd. It survives a look.

The rule is asymmetric​

Prices are shown as-is. 2450 is what the exchange publishes, what a market-data feed carries, and what you would type into a limit-price field. It is not divided anywhere, including on the way to the broker, because pence is what LSE expects to receive.

Derived amounts are divided. Order value, notional, fees, profit and loss, position value, anything computed by multiplying a price by a quantity, is divided by 100 and labelled in GBP.

So for 10 shares quoted at 2450:

limit price shown and sent   2450       (GBX, pence)
order value shown            £245.00    (GBP, 2450 × 10 ÷ 100)

GBX is never a balance​

GBX is a price unit, not a currency an account can hold. A balance, a capital allocation or a P&L figure labelled GBX would state a holding of pence where the account holds pounds. Balances are always GBP.

Figures Stretus computes are already converted​

Every monetary value Stretus returns (order value, fees, margin, realised and unrealised P&L, position value) has already had the factor applied and is already in the settlement currency. Do not divide those again. The factor applies only where a price is multiplied by a quantity on the spot, which for most readers means a spreadsheet rather than the product.

Portfolio totals​

A portfolio spanning several currencies is rolled up for the summary figures. Per-strategy amounts stay in the strategy's own currency; only the cross-strategy totals are converted.

Where a rollup involved a conversion, that is stated alongside it rather than implied. A converted total is an approximation, it depends on a rate captured at read time, and presenting it identically to a native total would hide that.

A note on Indian number formatting​

Rupee amounts are grouped in lakh and crore (₹12,34,567.50), because that is how a rupee figure is read. Amounts in other currencies use the grouping conventional for them ($1,234,567.50). The grouping follows the currency, not your locale, a dollar figure grouped in crore would be unreadable to the people who hold it.

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