Reconciliation & drift
Every 15 minutes, SleeveFolio reconciles its local books against your broker: orders, fills, and positions are synced, and any disagreement becomes a drift item on the Reconciliation page. You can also trigger a re-check manually from that page; both paths run the identical sync. The recurring check covers the account you’re currently in; if automatic trading runs on your other account, that account gets the same check as part of its daily run.
Paper and live are reconciled separately: the page and the going-live gate only ever count the drift for the account you’re currently in, and acknowledging a drift item in one environment never clears it in the other.
The three drift signals
| Drift | Means | Investigate at |
|---|---|---|
| Untracked position | The broker holds something SleeveFolio has no record of | Positions |
| Position mismatch | Quantities disagree between broker and local books | Positions |
| Stale open order | A local order the broker no longer treats as open | Orders |
Paper clears itself; live asks you
On your paper account, drift clears itself automatically. A paper divergence is harmless — the usual cause is an Alpaca paper-account reset that wipes your positions — so SleeveFolio records it and resolves it on the same sync. Nothing for you to do: it won’t nag you or pause paper automatic trading. So a changed dashboard isn’t a mystery, it leaves a single note in your notification bell when it reconciles something. (One rare exception: an unusually large divergence — dozens of positions changing at once — can still pause paper trading as a safety backstop until the next clean check.)
On your live account, drift is left for you to clear. Each drift card offers Investigate (jumps to the screen that explains it) and a Resolve button (the acknowledge action) for a divergence you’ve reviewed and accept. A broker-vs-records mismatch on real money is worth a look before you wave it through, which is why live never auto-clears.
You don’t have to watch this page. When a live sync turns up drift that wasn’t there before, SleeveFolio alerts you on whichever channels you’ve opted into for reconciliation drift (email, push, and the in-app inbox) and the alert links straight back here. Paper is quieter: no email or push — just the single in-app note mentioned above, on the same reconciliation-drift preference you can mute.
Why live drift blocks the gate, and pauses auto-execute
Unacknowledged live drift means SleeveFolio’s view of your account is wrong somewhere, and live orders calculated from wrong records are how small discrepancies become real losses. That’s why zero unresolved drift is one of the two gate checks, and why a check whose results can’t be read blocks rather than passes.
Open live drift doesn’t only block the going-live gate. If you’ve turned on automatic trading, each live run also pauses until your drift list is clear, so the Reconciliation page is where you unblock live automatic trading too. When that’s the reason a run was skipped, the page shows an Automatic trading is paused until you resolve the drift below banner above the list. Paper drift auto-resolves, so in the ordinary case it never pauses paper automatic trading — only an unusually large divergence trips the same safety backstop there.