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PSA: do not use floating point for monetary amounts


MS Excel uses floating point, and it's used a ton in finance. Don't use floating-point for monetary amounts if you don't know what rounding mode you've set.


It's somewhat acceptable with double precision floats - never single precision floats.

But far better to just use integer cents.


Integer cents implies a specific rounding mode (truncation). That's probably not what you should be using. Floating point cents gets the best of both worlds (if you set the right rounding mode).


I have used single precision floats in my latest project just to disprove this baloney.


You are using 32 bit floats to represent money?

Does your project correctly calculate $300,000.00 + $0.01, (or even just correctly represent the value $300,000.01) and if so, how?


Obviously you can't accumulate cent by cent. You can't even safely accumulate by quarter. Epsilon is too large to do that. I calculate cumulative pnl using std::fma, then multiply AUM with that and round to cents. It's good enough for backtesting, and it shaves a bunch of seconds off the clock.


I see - I guess it's a financial modelling program or similar where the quantities don't represent precise values of money. I was imagining some kind of accounting-like app that would need to be reconciled with real-world balances.


Yes, we work with futures and the largest transaction is around 1000 qty. It is so rare that most banks have a fat finger alert for such quantities.




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