A holding is your position in a particular instrument in a transaction portfolio. LUSID does not maintain a static record of your holdings but rather generates them on demand from a history of all the transactions affecting the instruments in that portfolio.
Note: LUSID also automatically takes into account other economic activity such as corporate actions and manual holding adjustments.
The process is controlled using transaction types. Every transaction upserted to a portfolio must be assigned a transaction type that defines its 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.
LUSID has a number of built-in transaction types (such as FundsIn, Buy and Sell) that enable you to get started modeling basic economic activity. You can create as many custom transaction types as you need to model more complex behavior, and control the process of generating holdings.
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.
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Reference: Understand concepts and implications
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