Introduction to holdings

A holding is your position in an underlying instrument held in a transaction portfolio.

LUSID is a transaction-based system. It does not maintain a static record of your holdings in a portfolio but rather generates them on demand from the stored history of transactions, replayed in date order. 

This process is controlled using transaction types. Every transaction in a portfolio must be assigned a transaction type that defines the precise economic impact; that is, the effect on your holding in the underlying instrument, and also potentially on holdings in other instruments in the portfolio (such as currency holdings).

For example, the built-in Buy transaction type provided with LUSID is intended to signal a purchase of an instrument such as an equity or bond. When you generate a holdings report, for every transaction with a transaction type of Buy, LUSID automatically:

• Increases your holding in the underlying instrument (ie. BP) by the number of units purchased in the transaction.
• Decreases your holding in the transaction currency (ie. GBP) by the total consideration.

Note: LUSID reports holdings differently on the trade date vs. the settlement date. A holding has a holding type that indicates its state.

By default, LUSID reports holdings at the instrument level; that is, one holding per instrument transacted in the portfolio, and one holding per currency. You can change this:

• Using sub-holding keys. For example, you could divide your overall position in BP into two holdings representing different investment strategies.
• Using tax lots to segregate and expand instrument holdings into separate tax lots according to a particular accounting principle.

Providing you have appropriate permissions, you can generate a holdings report for a transaction portfolio from the Holdings dashboard in the LUSID web app:

Alternatively, you can interact with holdings programmatically:

• Using appropriate API endpoints in the Transaction Portfolios collection.
• Using the equivalent methods in the LUSID SDKs.
• If you have a Luminesce license, using dedicated read and write providers.

Explanation: See the big picture

• Understanding how LUSID uses transaction types to generate holdings

Reference: Understand concepts and implications

• What are the holding types?
• What are tax lots, and how does LUSID support tax lot accounting?

How-to guides: Get something done

• How do I generate a holdings report?
• How do I manually adjust or set holdings?
• How do I reconcile holdings?