ShortQty (FIX tag 705)

QtyFIX 4.4

ShortQty (tag 705) is a Qty field defined in FIX 4.4. It appears in 4 message types, always optionally.

At a glance

Tag: 705
Name: ShortQty
Datatype: Qty (float)
Dialects: FIX 4.4
Messages: 4

What the specification says

Short Quantity

Descriptions are quoted from the FIX Orchestra sources under the Apache 2.0 licence.

A real message using tag 705

PositionMaintenanceRequest · FIX 4.4

Tag	Field	Wire value	Meaning
8	BeginString	FIX.4.4
9	BodyLength	189
35	MsgType	AL	Position Maintenance Request
49	SenderCompID	BOARTEAM
56	TargetCompID	COUNTERPARTY
34	MsgSeqNum	2
52	SendingTime	20240101-12:00:00.000
710	PosReqID	EXAMPLE
709	PosTransType	1	Exercise
712	PosMaintAction	1	New: used to increment the overall transaction quantity
715	ClearingBusinessDate	20240101
1	Account	ACCT-11223
581	AccountType	1	Account is carried on customer Side of Books
60	TransactTime	20240101-12:00:00.000
702	NoPositions2 entries	2	repeating group
703	PosType	TQ	Transaction Quantity
705	ShortQty	1000000
703	PosType	TQ	Transaction Quantity
705	ShortQty	1000000
10	CheckSum	105

Edit and decode it yourself

Shown with | separators for readability. On the wire FIX uses SOH (0x01), an invisible control byte — and because BodyLength and CheckSum are computed over the actual bytes, the two forms have different checksums. Both are valid and both decode here.

Open in the full decoder →

Generated from the FIX 4.4 dictionary and verified at build time: it parses and validates with no issues. Open the decoder to try your own message.

Where tag 705 appears

Requiredness is a property of the message, not of the field: the same tag can be optional in one message and conditionally required in another.

Message	MsgType	Requiredness	Where in the message
AssignmentReport	AW	Optional	inside the PositionQty component
PositionMaintenanceReport	AM	Optional	inside the PositionQty component
PositionMaintenanceRequest	AL	Optional	inside the PositionQty component
PositionReport	AP	Optional	inside the PositionQty component

Wire format

A decimal quantity. Fractional quantities are legal, which is why this is a float family rather than an integer. @boarteam/fix parses the value as a number and reports parse/invalid-float when it does not lex as one; the raw string is kept so precision and trailing zeros are never lost.

Read tag 705 in TypeScript

decode.tsts

import { createFixEngine } from "@boarteam/fix";import { dictionary } from "@boarteam/fix-dict-fix44";const fix = createFixEngine(dictionary);const { message, issues } = fix.parse(raw);const field = message.fields[705];field?.name;   // "ShortQty"field?.raw;    // the verbatim wire stringfield?.value;  // coerced to a number

Decode this in your own code

The same engine that produced the decoded example above is an Apache-2.0 npm package with zero runtime dependencies. It runs in Node and in the browser, and parse() returns problems as data instead of throwing.

npm i @boarteam/fix @boarteam/fix-dict-fix44

Try the decoder Source on GitHub