I hope you're able to invent a daily-operations procedure which you deem to be trustworthy, acceptable, comfortable, and robust in the face of unexpected and unprecedented price shocks. It will probably include
- order placement
- order fill checks (actual fills vs. computer expected fills)
- calculating and logging slippage on all filled orders (for research purposes and/or to compare different brokers)
- position matching check #1: actual contract month vs. computer expected month
- position matching check #2: actual Long/Short direction vs. computer expected
- ... position matching check #N: actual #contracts vs. computer expected
- discrepancy repairs (aka "fixups"): when actual position not equal to computer position
- total margin check: actual (broker's statement) vs. computer expected
- equity comparison: actual (broker's statement) vs. computer expected
- ad infinitum
If the procedure you invent happens to include Trading Blox "Broker Positions", embrace them. If it doesn't, you can safely ignore them. Either way, invent the absolute best possible methodology
for you and then learn to love it.
"Best methodology
for you" means that different traders have different resources and different goals. Some are able to watch the markets real time; others can spend 10 minutes before work on "daily ops" and 30 minutes after dinner. Some traders have fulltime programmers available, 40 hours a week; others have no programming resources whatsoever. Some want "down to the penny, perfect matching", others are happy when matching is "good enough for government work". Build your ops plan to satisfy
you; other traders can mind their own business - they're not you.
I deliberately omitted "discretionary override" procedures from the list above -- but for some traders, human overrides
(jumping the system) are an integral part of the overall trading plan. If you are one of these traders, you'll need to invent a way to monitor your overrides so they operate as you intend. You don't want to override on Tuesday and then have it nullified on Wednesday by an automatic "fixup," so devise a methodology to keep things consistent.