Paper Trades 101

Steps：

We recommend you to use Google Chrome browser to access MAF Cloud. You may change the server location (Singapore/China) and language (English/Chinese) at the top right corner of the login page or under Settings.

Steps to upload paper trades:

1. Portfolio -- Create Portfolio (this is similar to categorising paper trades that need to be uploaded into folders, such as XX account of XX futures companies as the portfolio name)

2. Trades -- Paper Trades -- Create New Paper Trades (upload the futures/paper trades daily statements and capture the daily transaction details)

3. After uploading the trades, you may edit the Trader, Category, Strategy or Account.

4. Select the portfolio created in Step 1 for each trade and submit to save the data.

1. Create New Portfolio

Before uploading your paper trades, we would recommend you to create new portfolio first. Thereafter, once you upload your paper trades, you can allocate the portfolio directly to the trades. This is similar to categorising the paper trades into folders, such as XX account of XX futures companies as the portfolio name.

You may choose to allocate both paper and physical trades into the same portfolio, and the system will automatically calculate the positions and P/L in each portfolio. You may choose to organise multiple child portfolios under the parent portfolio, so you can check the individual positions and P/L of each child portfolio, as well as the total positions and P/L of all the child portfolios by checking the parent portfolio.

Every physical trade with its unique Deal No. is considered a portfolio, so the physical trade will appear in the Portfolio page or under Portfolio Name column. So you may choose to allocate paper trades directly into the physical trades, or choose to create a new portfolio and allocate the paper trades and/or physical trades into the portfolio.

a. Please click on Portfolio from the navigation sidebar on the left, followed by Create Portfolio to create new portfolio.

Open

Please fill in the Name of the portfolio and Settlement Currency to determine the currency for calculating the P/L in the portfolio. You will not be able to change the Settlement Currency once you save the portfolio, you may delete the portfolio and create a new portfolio as an alternative.

Please click Next, followed by Submit to create the portfolio.

Open

Note: CNH/USD

In MAF, will use public market data price, CNHUSD rate is the same as CNYUSD.

if users want to use their own CNH rate, users need to maintain own market data price in proprietary market data table and choose PTY MARKET PRICE to use own CNH rate.

In Proprietary Market Data table, please choose below product code and input date (DATE) and exchange rate (SETTLEMENT) before saving:

• OTC/^USDCNH U.S. Dollar/Chinese Offshore Spot

if there is no private rate, MAF will use public rate.

b. After creating the portfolio, you can easily manage and organise your portfolio(s) with the portfolio hierarchy tree structure situated on the left. You can use the 'Search' bar to search for keywords for relevant portfolio to be displayed.

You can simply drag-and-drop the portfolio(s) to change its ordering, and/or place one portfolio as a child of another portfolio, as well as delete it (by clicking the 'bin' icon). You may also click to expand the drop-down list (represented by a '+' icon) next to the portfolio to view its child portfolio(s) (if any). Simply click on any portfolio and its summary will be reflected in the table on the right. Clicking on the parent portfolio will display the combined summary details of its child portfolio, so you can have an overview of the overall performance (positions and P/L) of the sub portfolios.

Please note that to place a portfolio as a child (sub-portfolio) of a parent portfolio, the parent portfolio must not contain any trades. You will not be able to add trades into a parent portfolio as a parent portfolio is used to compute the overall performance of its sub-portfolios and must be left empty (no trades added) for this purpose.

In this example, Portfolio 'Team A' and 'Team B' are the parent portfolios, and the portfolios of their traders (Trader 1, 2, 3, 4) are the sub-portfolios. Clicking on the parent portfolios will display the overall performance of the traders (sub-portfolios), and clicking on each trader's portfolio will display their individual performance. To determine the overall performance of both teams, you can create another portfolio named 'Total', and drag-and-drop Portfolio 'Team A' and 'Team B' into it. The total performance of the portfolios will be reflected on the right.

c. To recalculate your portfolio(s), tick the checkbox of the portfolio(s) and click 'Recalculate'. It allows you to choose a start date to select the earliest trade date to recalculate trades from. If empty, the system will use the earliest possible trade date to perform recalculations.

All the data in the selected portfolio(s) will be recalculated and you may need to refresh the page to view the updates. Choosing to recalculate your parent portfolio(s) will auto recalculate the sub-portfolios. 

For more information about Portfolio, please refer to Portfolio .

2. Upload Paper Trades and Allocate to Portfolio

Please refer to below to learn how to upload your paper trades into the system to capture daily statements' data.

Domestic Trades：China Futures Market Monitoring Center to download the daily statements in CSV format
Offshore Trades：Obtain the daily statements in CSV format from Brokers

Please refer to below video or scroll down for the user guide.

Domestic Trades

1. Please access China Futures Market Monitoring Center to download the daily statement files in CSV format.

2. Please select the settlement date to download the respective daily statements, monthly statements will not be supported in the system.

Please click on the Download button to download the files in CSV format. All the files downloaded in the website are standardised and will be downloaded directly as a CSV file.

3. Downloaded files will be shown as follows:

Once you open your CSV file, please follow the details in the below screenshot to access the files in the correct format: Unicode (UTF-8) and comma.

Here is a sample of a CTP file, with confidential data removed.

Please access the MAF Cloud Portal：https://portal.mafint.com/ and follow the steps below to upload your paper trades into the system:

4. Please click on Trades>Paper Trade from the navigation sidebar on the left.

followed by New Paper Trade

5. Before you upload your file, if necessary, you may choose to tick H/S (Hedge/Speculation) or AGGR (Aggregate) check boxes (both are unticked by default). More details will be shared below.

AGGR (Aggregate)

To allow you to view the aggregated summary of your paper trades, click on the “Aggregate” (AGGR) checkbox to tick or untick.

Tick: If you tick the checkbox and upload your file, your data will be categorised according to PRODUCT CODE>BUY/SELL>CONTRACT YEAR>CONTRACT MONTH>VALUATION DATE for you to check against any transaction summary.

Untick: If you untick the checkbox and upload your file, it will be uploaded as per normal according to the statements.

This is applicable for all types of products - futures, forward, spot and options products etc.

H/S (Hedge/Speculation)

Tick: Tick the “H/S” checkbox to allow the original “TRADE TYPE” (Hedge/Speculation) in the file to be displayed.

Untick: If unticked, “TRADE TYPE” will be displayed as Speculation by default for all trades.

If necessary, you may input IDB and IDB COMMISSION (can be negative value). The system will then add IDB COMMISSION value to the following functions to calculate P/L:

IDB COMMISSION 撮合费 and IDB 撮合商 will appear in Paper Trades:

• view table

• edit table

• create new trade table

• grouped trade table (view)

• all trades table

for future reference, commission and IDB commission will be split into 2 accordingly when grouped trades into 2 etc. IDB Commission can be negative value.

IDB COMMISSION 撮合费 will also appear in Portfolio:

• Meta table

• Trades table

as well as in Dashboard:

• Group P/L app

• Portfolio P/L Details app

6. To upload your file, please hover your mouse cursor over the “…” at the top right corner of the page. Click on your broker’s name eg CTP Position from the dropdown list and upload your file. You may choose to click on the Add Row button to manually input your data. If any of your broker’s name is not available in the list, please contact us via support@mafint.com and provide sample data template to allow us to map and add the template into the list.

If you do not have the relevant daily statement template, please contact us via support@mafint.com or access the link: How to Upload Paper Trades Using MAF Template to learn how to upload data based on MAF template instead.

To learn more about T PLUS logic, please refer to Creating New Paper Trade(s) .

If necessary, you may access Futures Commission Merchant (FCM) Statement to learn how to upload FCM statement files.

7. Once paper trades data have been uploaded successfully, please check that the data is correct. If necessary. you may add Category, Trader or Strategy.

Once you are done inputting your data, you may allocate the trade(s) into portfolios directly in the page:

• Input the Portfolio Name directly in the table for each trade by double clicking on the cell and input or select the portfolio you wish to allocate the trade(s) into, or

• Tick the trade(s) and input or select the portfolio you wish to allocate the trade(s) into at the bottom of the page.

• Otherwise, you may leave it empty. If you have not created a portfolio yet, you can simply allocate them later (Please refer to Creating New Portfolio and Managing Paper Trades ).

Once done, please ensure that no cells are highlighted in red, and click on Submit to save the data.

8. The 'From' and 'To' dates are set 1 week by default, ranging from 1 week before to today's date. You may adjust the dates and click 'Search' for the data to be filtered and displayed in the table accordingly.

Please note: The dates you set will remain unchanged unless you log out and re-login, and the dates will reset to default. You can also utilise the filters function at the top of the table to filter your paper trade. Please refer to Table Settings to learn more.

Here is a sample of Broker BPI’s daily statement template.

Offshore Trades

The steps for uploading domestic and offshore daily settlement statements are the step, please follow Steps 4 to 7 above. You may obtain the daily statements files in Excel or .CSV format from your broker (it should not only be the file for new transactions but should also contain the entire statement of funds, positions and new transactions. You may then select the broker name in the dropdown list and upload the file accordingly.

If any of the broker’s name is not available in the dropdown list, please notify us at support@mafint.com and provide us with the sample file in order for us to add the template into the system. You may also refer to How to Upload Paper Trades Using MAF Template to learn how to download the MAF template to manually process and upload the data into the system.

The 'From' and 'To' dates are set 1 week by default, ranging from 1 week before to today's date. You may adjust the dates and click 'Search' for the data to be filtered and displayed in the table accordingly. Note: The dates you set will remain unchanged unless you log out and re-login, and the dates will reset to default.

Please note: The dates you set will remain unchanged unless you log out and re-login, and the dates will reset to default. You can also utilise the filters function at the top of the table to filter your paper trade. Please refer to Table Settings to learn more.

For more information, please refer to Paper Trade.

3. Create Quantitative Models/Reports

a. After allocating paper trades (and physical trades) into the portfolio, you may create quantitative models and reports to determine the performance of your portfolios/trades. Please click on Dashboard>Individual from the navigation sidebar on the left to access the Dashboard page.

b. Various quantitative models/reports can be created and displayed in the dashboard. If you need to customise any models/reports, please notify us at support@mafint.com. You can select a model/report in the drop-down list and click 'Create' to create a new model/report.

The model/report you have just created will be displayed as empty at the beginning, which requires you to set up the details by clicking on the Settings (gear icon) button at the top right corner of the app.

 Most Dashboard Models/Reports have similar steps. You may choose to select individual or multiple portfolios to be calculated and displayed. Please confirm other details in the Settings page before clicking Submit to proceed. You may edit the details anytime as necessary.

You may filter, arrange and categorise the rows, columns and groups according to your preferences, and may also enlarge the window accordingly.

Public/Proprietary:

PUB (PUBLIC) MARKET PRICE: If selected, the system will use the public market/settlement price obtained from various Exchange sources to perform calculations

PTY (PRIVATE/PROPRIETARY) MARKET PRICE: If selected, the system will use the proprietary market/settlement price that you have input/uploaded in Proprietary Market Data

Auto-Update：

Tick: Resets the dates to default once you leave the ‘Dashboard’ page.

Untick: Dates according to your settings remain unchanged once you leave the ‘Dashboard’ page.

For more information, please refer to Guide to Dashboard.

Paper Trades Management Models/Reports/Apps Examples

• Counterparty Position Risk Summary

• Daily Pricing Position Change

• Futures Account

• Fund NAV Report

• FX Exposure

• Group P/L

• Hedge Ratio

• Historical Group P/L

• Open Position Details

• Portfolio Grid

• Position Matrix

• Portfolio Performance Chart

• Portfolio P/L Details

• Portfolio Total P/L by Instrument Contract

• Value-at-Risk Model

Please access Paper Trades - Dashboard Models/Reports Summary to learn more.