how do you track your calls and puts?

Question

at this time I use excell but way to time consummin. I buy and sell the same options over and over and generly do anywhere between 30 and 40 trades a week?

Answer 1

I also trade options, doing maybe 50 trades per week, so I hear what you're asking. For me it used to be a serious nightmare, and now it's only a slight nightmare. :)

I had my account at Brownco, which didn't help me much with record-keeping. Last year Brownco was acquired by ETrade, which has a nice trading platform called E*Trade PRO.

As for records, I still use Excel. I separate out three sections, one for short options, one for long options, and one for long stocks (I short a few stocks but not many, so I just keep them there).

I have the first seven columns laid out in Sched D format (# shares, description, buy date, sell date, sales price, cost, gain/loss).

Every day *almost without fail*, from the ETrade Portfolio page I click on Account Records. It produces yesterday's trades in PDF format. Pretty easy to extract the information and enter into Excel, just takes a few minutes; I do it in between trades in the morning.

When I am done doing the day's accounting I sort the short options by Buy Date, Issue, and Sell Date. It's then easy to find the place for tomorrow's updates. In the long options and long stocks section I sort by Sell Date, Issue, and Buy Date.

For taxes, I go back and sort them according to long term/short term gains, and list them as separate attachments to Sched D. On the actual Sched D I refer to each attachment and its totals.

Supposedly, ETrade can download all of the transactions into Excel format. I decided maybe I'd try that next year, but meanwhile I'm retaining my old system as a backup in case I can't get the data in a useful format.

I realize this is long and complicated. I hope it makes sense.

Happy trading and best of success.

Answer 2

I would set up something in Microsoft Access. This way you can query anything you want.

Answer 3

I wish I was your broker.