For your first question, if you changed the square feet of space being claimed so that both home offices are claiming half of the total, then your consulting business expenses were reduced from this change, which would increase your self-employment tax and therefore increase your taxes even though the trading business created a loss.
A small loss of $265 should not create a red flag if the return were being examined by someone who understands what they are seeing. The audit risk meter is most likely not taking into account that the income from the trader business is not reported on the Schedule C since this is not a very common situation. Even with the audit risk meter being higher, your actual risk of being audited is still very low.
You are being truthful in claiming office space for two businesses since you do use the space for both. Otherwise, you are actually violating the 'exclusive' use requirement if you claimed it only for the consulting business and still used it for the trading business.
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