Call option trading journal

The attached Excel spreadsheet helps me when writing naked puts. Excel spreadsheet to help me when writing covered calls. Some positions can take six months or more from start to end and without tracking each trade from selling puts and then having the stock assigned to me and finally to selling a covered call on it, I found it too not difficult to loose track with where I was. If the underlying stock is highly volatile, I can not difficult see that selling puts well out of the money provides a return I can be happy with for the reduced risk. When analyzing each option contract I compare which strike and premium is the best choice for me. If the underlying stock is not very volatile, I can not difficult see that I need to skip it and move to another stock for review. Having the industry sector breakdown included in the same view also keeps me from loading up to heavy in one industry, no matter how bullish I am on it. Each of these steps has become automatic for me and I can flip through a half dozen choices in less than a minute to make a well thought out decision. The attached Excel spreadsheet is my monthly view of gains plus industry breakdown of holdings along with my profit or loss of money tallies per stock.

December with a reasonable profit. IB is crediting for me. The lower trend line has provided support to every dip since December without one exception. Now I need to avoid making the same mistake with the options I have remaining. October was another good month for me and those investors who are not short the market. The first technical indicator is more subjective than the second one. That change is basically from not replacing my XLF naked puts. Not being fully invested during a bull market is begging for missed opportunities each month.

The only two October naked put options I had remaining expired worthless today. AAPL, IWM, and QQQ naked puts. Two technical indicators are predicting the large cap ETF is due to take a breather. Since these October naked puts are so far out of the money, I opted to leave them alone and will let them expire worthless on Friday. IWM, MDY, XLF, and ADI naked puts. For November expiration, I have the two puts I just sold two days ago on IWM and QQQ to replace the October naked puts. Luckily, I was alert this morning premarket and saw AAPL futures were lower.

Just a few minutes later, my other limit order hit. My September ADI put was nearly worthless and with option expiration Friday being tomorrow, I decided to go ahead and roll my naked put to December and start over with it. That brought me to today, three days from expiration with a bunch of unused cash on the sidelines. While it does feel good to book the premium collected as profit for the month you sold it, it makes more sense to realize it after the option is closed, either through expiration or through buying the option to close. Please let me know what you think! DGI, selling Puts to collect incomes while I fill out my portfolio. And I love their FRIP, F for Flexible.

The latest versions of all my investing spreadsheets are available online here. Have you any plans in the future for adding an additional level of security to your covered call spreadsheets by offering a married put or collar version? This field is for selling covered calls. It does combine both options and dividends into one spreadsheet. It does not take into account any gains or losses from selling the underlying stock. And, as similar to my dividend tracker, it also shows a table displaying monthly option income each year. Exp Date stands for expiration date and is the date that the contracted is scheduled to end. Oh well, I will try to tweak it myself. This field calculates the amount of money needed in the account for a naked put sold in an account with margin.

If I bought to close the option then I would add that additional commission to the original value. Enter the underlying stock price at the time you opened the contract. Do you have your options spreadsheet in Excel format by chance? Any stock transactions can be performed on a separate spreadsheet. LEAP call and a sold LEAP put on one sheet. It currently works for selling covered calls, selling cash secured puts, and selling naked puts. It is not yet set up for calculating the rate of return for naked calls. This show the final profit or loss of money for each finalized option trade. The ticker symbol for the stock underlying the option contract.

However, this field is not currently used. The cell will be dark green for profit and red for a loss of money. This stands for buy or sell and refers to how the option was first started. Wish Schwab did something similar. This can changed by editing the formula in column U, if desired. If the option has already expired, then 0 will be displayed rather than a negative number. Thank you for creating your deceptively simple yet elegant spreadsheet for tracking options trades; specifically covered calls.

However, if you find this spreadsheet useful, please consider donating to support my coffee fund and hosting costs. Any other features you would like to see? Excel which, appears to have been submarined by the latest fiasco on Yahoo. This field is only used at this point for puts. As with my dividend tracker spreadsheet, the orange cells are ones that you manually edit and the green cells are calculated automatically. That cash is ear marked for that option trade in case it gets put to you. Premium is the money collected for selling a put or call. The annualized rate of return is based solely on the option rate of return as calculated on the strike price. If your broker has different requirements then this formula can be updated to reflect that.

If you sold a call, then this field is not used. BTW, I have enough accounts at Scottrade that they give me free regular trades, I only have to pay for options. If you bought to close, then type in whatever premium you paid. This is the price to exit the option. This field shows the current stock price of the underlying stock. Open, Closed, or Exercised.

An example of exercised would be that you sold a covered call and it got called away from you. Great spreadsheet, thanks for all the hard work you put into it, to make our lives that much simpler. Let me know how you like it. That would be amazing! Calls sheet is where you enter all the transactions data. Sorry to hear about the loss of money in your IRA, but great job using options to get that amount back up. Open Date is the date that the option contract was opened. Could you send me your most updated version of your options spreadsheet and any other ones you use to track your investments? Do NOT manually append a row at the end. This field shows the break even price for the option exclusive of any fees.

Did you figure out how to include a formula or another couple columns to calculate your gains on a covered call position on a stock you already own? Calculates the annualized rate of return based on the smaller margin cash reserve. In doing things this way, the entire trade is complete on a single row. CC investors are in or near retirement age and are the largest segment of American CC investors; Your thoughts? This field is used to calculate the annualized rate of return for a margin account and is used in the calculation for determining margin cash reserve. Summary tab get whacked out, and have to be manually edited for correctness. Enter any fees associated with the trade.

Instead, copy, say the previous last row, and modify it. Google Finance call to look up the stock price so you must use the ticker symbol as recognized by Google Finance. The strike price of the option. The spreadsheet is free and will always be available for free. This field show the amount of money needed on hand in order to sell the option. This shows the days left on the option contract. This calculates the annualized rate of return for the option trade. This will be 100 x the strike price. This keeps things simple. There is no end to making this great product even greater.

It is also what you pay if buying a put or call. This is the date you either closed the option or it expired. Otherwise all the green rows for that row would end up blank as well. It is used to calculate the Days Held column and is important for accurately calculating the annualized rate of return. Just wondering if you had thought about doing that. As described above, it does not include any profit or loss of money from selling the underlying stock in a covered call situation. So, first and foremost your sheet appears unaffected by the mess at Yahoo. Virtually every trade is on the blog, though there is a delay. No ads on my blog.

The simpler a journal is, the more likely a person is to maintain it. Options tend to have tiny readership, so ad income would likely be less than a 5 cents a year if monetized. These I keep real simple. PrtSc so it saves the screenshot of how the option chain looks on entering. Note: I do not specify a price for either portion of the trade. If I no longer want to own the stock, I will accept my loss of money and move on. That is the worst loss of money I anticipate taking on this trade. XXY and the stock price heads lower, there has to be some point at which I want to cut my loss of money. That will not devastate my account and I am willing to take this very minimal risk.

Be sure NOT to enter the total dollar cost for buying 200 shares and selling two calls. Risk Management alternative: I do not have to exit the position. NOTE: I am now familiar with option symbols. That is important because my stock picks do not always move higher. Friday, Apr 18, 20xx. Nor will I sell the call option at its bid price.

We always enter orders per stock share or per option. April 50 calls on my 200 shares. The trial version is valid for 30 days and holds every feature as the original one except exporting from Capital Gains report. Before buying the software you can try if it meets all your requirements. Getting familiar with your habits is essential to success. Have you ever reviewed a past trade and wondered what happened? Get acquainted with your habits! Recording your transactions is just as important as examining the history of stock before entering a trade. TradingDiary Pro will be your coach in your quest to develop a winning method and become a better trader.

The idea is to keep a record of why you entered or exited a specific trade, what the circumstances were, and whether your decision was correct or not; using this information you can then learn from the past. Please note that the software periodically communicates with the license servers to validate your trial. Save time and make more money! Record keeping is critical to running an efficient business and a diary can improve your performance far more than you might ever have imagined. Why is it essential? Develop a winning method! Keeping a journal helps you understand your motivations, and become a better trader. Are you an active trader who makes a number of decisions and runs a number of trades each day? Control your trading performance!

Keeping a trading journal prevents you from trading randomly and impulsively, and losing a huge amount of money; in turn, it makes you a much more successful trader. If you are satisfied, we would be happy to have you among our clients! If you have ever made a trading decision in a moment of excitement and you were sure you were making the best deal only to discover it was a huge mistake, then you will like TradingDiary Pro because it helps you to recognize these moments. Forget the Excel templates, sheets and trade logs you spent weeks building and then need to fill in on a daily basis! Then TradingDiary Pro will help you to not difficult record and retrieve past and present performance statistics. Give yourself the chance to improve your performance, and become as good as you have always dreamt you would be. After the trial period you can use the software in read only mode which means you cannot modify your TradingDiary Pro database anymore. None of the technical analysis software, stock news sites or trader seminars can save you the time and effort of self appraisal.

Check out the features! The clear visual charts will help you to understand the true human nature of trading, avoid repeatedly making the same mistake, and control your behavior. Review your trading practice, monitor your decision making patterns and control your emotions. First, an aspiring options trader should take a basic course in stock options similar to that given by Options University, they call it Options 101. Once the more complex strategies are understood, then the blossoming trader should undertake a protracted time to do some extensive paper trading. My losers can be doozies because of the unlimited risk of selling naked strangles. And I would absolutely have a column that tracks what the price of the underlying was right when the trade was opened. It is less work and avoids the horrible situation of novice traders following me into losers. Mostly I do it for myself.

There are no ads on the blog. Keeping a journal is the number one suggestion I have for novice traders. Reason can be one word, such as: earnings, chart, gut, news. Thanks for the mention but he gets all the credit! My trading has gotten better, less emotion driven, during the time I have been blogging. If the majority of my covered call trades are profitable, why am I unable to outperform the major market index? And be sure to check out our Zacks Options Trader. Without auditing his trading journal, I could foretell the problem. While neither one is completely avoidable, following a few simple steps can help minimize losses and reduce equity drawdowns.

Streaks tend to occur during major market corrections and can ravage a covered call portfolio. If an upside profit is limited, then a downside loss of money should be limited too. He overlooked risk management. One way to neutralize this risk is through portfolio diversification. The answer is quite simple: risk management. One should also trade a few uncorrelated trading strategies.

How much did you earn last year trading covered calls? This is a very simple remedy; nonetheless, it yields a more acceptable and more manageable number. Many covered call traders fall in love with their stocks and plan to hold their positions into perpetuity. Nothing drastic is going to happen in 30 minutes. For each trade you place you absolutely must have a plan for when you will take profits, cut losses or adjust your trade. Part of that system is what you do AFTER placing a trade. After placing your trade you should enter the trade in your trade log so that you will be able to review it at a later date. You can always close the trade straight away if there is an important announcement during the life of your trade. Something I was guilty of when I first started out was tick watching.

If you really want to be a successful options trader, you need to have good systems in place. Life is just too short for that sort of thing, after placing your trade and double checking everything, close out of your brokerage account for at least the next 30 minutes and just relax. After placing your trade, double check that you have enough in your account to cover your current margin requirements. Review your plans for the trade you just placed and WRITE THEM DOWN or at least mark them on a chart. Below is an extract from my trade log, if you want a copy of this spreadsheet template, just hit the button below. This becomes a personal preference in how you wish to view your individual trade leg analysis figures.

This is the quickest and easiest method and provides all of the stats provided by the TJS Analysis sheet. This means that no Qty or Prices would need to be entered in the Trading Log. View example: Trading Log, Analysis sheet.