Curriculum·S211 Portfolio Analytics and Performance Measurement·about 33 min
Building the reporting stack
By the end of this lesson you can
- →Assemble the six records that make every calculation in this course possible
- →Run a monthly close that produces both return measures and the benchmark comparison
- →Price the difference between maintaining records and reconstructing them
- →Identify which inputs stop being available when a venue does
Sophomore · enrolled learners
This lesson opens with FTX, November 2022.
- What happened
- John J. Ray III was appointed chief executive of the FTX debtors and filed a declaration in the District of Delaware bankruptcy court on 17 November 2022. Drawing on roughly forty years of restructuring experience that included overseeing the Enron bankruptcy, he stated that never in his career had he seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred there, and described a concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated and potentially compromised individuals. He repeated the substance of that assessment in testimony to the House Financial Services Committee on 13 December 2022.
- The decision point
- FTX had many causes and this is only one of them. But the absence of trustworthy records is the specific reason nobody, inside the company or outside it, could establish the size of the hole until the entity was already gone. A reporting stack is not administrative overhead sitting alongside the real activity. It is the only instrument that shows the position. The individual version of the same failure is close to universal: very few participants in this asset class can produce, on demand, a complete list of what they hold, where it is, and what it cost.
What you will be able to answer
- →What are the six records in the stack?
- →What does the monthly close produce?
- →What does an unprovable cost basis cost you?
- →Which inputs disappear with a venue?
Orientation and Year One are open: anyone can read them without an account. From Year Two onward the lessons are for enrolled learners, because progress through the later years only means anything if it is tracked against a record.
It is free. We do not sell the list and there is nothing to buy at the end of it.
Sources and review
- https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/17/ftx-ceo-shreds-bankman-fried-never-seen-such-a-failure-of-controls-.html
- https://democrats-financialservices.house.gov/uploadedfiles/hhrg-117-ba00-wstate-rayj-20221213.pdf
- https://www.irs.gov/forms-pubs/about-form-1099-da
- https://www.spglobal.com/spdji/en/research-insights/spiva/
Confidence high·Volatility medium·Reviewed 2026-08-06·Owner unassigned
Contested
F108 owns tax treatment, the six transaction fields and the broker reporting regime. This lesson uses those records as inputs to performance measurement and prices the consequence of not having them. Keep the split and do not re-derive the tax rules here.
The zero basis outcome in the worked example is the consequence of being unable to substantiate what an asset cost. Rates, thresholds and the availability of alternative substantiation vary by jurisdiction, and broker reporting now covers some acquisitions but not self-custody transfers, on-chain activity, or anything acquired before the regime began.