What changes between a request and a recorded trade?

When a customer says “I want to sell ten grams of gold”, nothing in their holdings has changed yet. That is an intent. The financial effect comes into being only when the quantity, price and authority are approved and the result is recorded.

If a system does not separate the two, balances change because of requests that never became trades, and the operations team has to correct them by hand later.

Every trade should carry its own specific price. The day’s reference price is useful guidance, but it is not the price at which the trade took place.

Keeping the reference price separate from the trade price means you can later say exactly what price each trade was approved at, even if the reference price has changed many times since.

Turning a request into a trade is a decision that should belong to a specific person. The important question is whether that person had approval authority for this account and this asset.

Authority that depends only on a job title is not enough. Precise authority depends on the role, the account where the trade happens and the asset concerned.

An approved result should be recorded completely, in one step, and stay with the same account, asset and unit. A less obvious point matters too: if the response to a submitted operation is uncertain for any reason, submitting again must not create a second trade.

A sound system returns the result already recorded for that same request; and if there is no result, it does not run a new trade automatically.

Trades in HOLD OS are manual: quantity and price are recorded explicitly, and the result is recorded only after approval by someone with authority. A request creates no movement in balances until it is approved and finally recorded, and a reference price never replaces the approved trade price.