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Reading my account statement line by line, what the comment fields and fees told me

I never really read my statement until I started comparing it with my journal. Doing it line by line showed me a few things I'd been ignoring.

Each trade shows the open price, close price, commission, swap and profit. When I matched the open and close prices with my screenshots, they were nearly always the same, which is reassuring. Where they differed, it was at busy times and the difference was small. That gave me a real sense of my slippage, which I'd only had as a feeling before.

The commission lines were consistent, but I noticed the swap charges on trades that were open over rollover, which I hadn't realised were adding up. Some were small credits and some were charges, and a few of my longer holds had cost more than I thought.

The comment field is useful too. It can show whether an order was closed by a stop, a target or manually, and whether the trade was closed by the platform for some reason. I check it for anything I don't recognize.

If there's ever something that doesn't match, you'll want the statement and your screenshots together.

Swaps are the one that surprised me too. I knew they existed but never added them up. Doing it once a month showed me that a couple of trades I let run overnight had cost more in swap than I thought, especially on pairs with a big interest rate gap. Now I check the swap table for the pairs I trade every few months, because brokers change them. For pure scalping it barely matters, but the odd trade held over rollover is where it shows up.

The slippage point is good. Matching statement prices to screenshots gave me a real number for slippage instead of a feeling, and the number was smaller than I feared. That actually helped my psychology, because I had been blaming the broker for losses that were really my own entries. It also gave me a baseline. If I ever see the slippage get clearly worse, I have something concrete to compare against and to show the broker. I would encourage anyone who has never done it to sit down with last month's statement and a coffee once.