Why broker credit and bonus are not deposits — and why your numbers may change

The short version

Money can arrive in a trading account in two very different ways. Either the trader funded it — a deposit from their own pocket — or the broker put it there: credit, a bonus, interest, a correction.

Both raise the balance. Only one is the trader's capital at risk. ConfirmedTrades now records which is which, and shows them apart in the Finance records section of every account.

Why it matters for a track record

Return on capital is a fraction: profit divided by the money put at risk. Inflate the denominator and the return looks worse; understate it and the return looks better than it was.

Counting broker credit as a deposit inflates that denominator. A trader who deposited $1,000 and received $1,000 of credit appears to have risked $2,000. If they made $200, the record would show a 10% return instead of the 20% they actually earned on their own money.

The reverse is the dangerous case. Credit can be withdrawn by the broker, and on many accounts it evaporates the moment you try to take money out. A balance propped up by credit is not the same as a balance built by trading, and a reader comparing two track records deserves to see the difference.

What Finance records shows

Every movement that changed the balance without a trade causing it, in one list:

• Deposit and Withdrawal — the trader's own money in and out.
• Credit — money the broker lends against the account. It raises the balance but is not the trader's capital, and the broker can take it back.
• Bonus — added by the broker, usually as a promotion. The trader did not deposit it.
• Interest — paid or charged on the balance.
• Correction, Commission, Dividend, Tax — the broker settling its own books.

How the totals are calculated

Deposited and Withdrawn count only the trader's own money. A credit or bonus never appears in them.

Broker adjustments totals everything else, so it is visible rather than hidden inside another number.

Net funding after — the running column — also counts only real funding. Adjustment rows show a dash there, because they moved the balance without adding capital.

Time-weighted return (TWR) is unaffected either way. TWR neutralises every external cash movement, credit included, which is precisely what it is for: it measures the trading decisions, not the funding.

Why an existing account's figures can change

Until recently the connector could not always tell the two apart. On MetaTrader 4 in particular, a credit entry and a deposit entry look almost identical in the account history, and both were recorded as deposits.

The connector now reads the type the broker actually booked, and re-scans an account's history once to correct entries recorded before it could. On an account that has ever received credit, that means deposits fall, and because deposits are the denominator, absolute gain rises.

Nothing was invented and no trade was touched. The same money is still there — it is simply filed where it belongs.

What owners can and cannot hide

An owner chooses which sections of their public page to show, and Finance records is one of them.

What they cannot do is present borrowed money as their own capital. The deposit figures that feed the headline return are calculated from the classified data whether or not the section is displayed — hiding the list does not move credit back into deposits.

Checking an account yourself

Open any public account page and look for Finance records. Read the summary line first: Deposited, Withdrawn, Net funding, and — if it appears — Broker adjustments.

A visible Broker adjustments figure is not a red flag by itself. Plenty of legitimate accounts earn interest or take a promotional bonus. It is context: it tells you how much of the balance the trader actually put up, which is the number every other figure on the page is measured against.