Any serious options trader must have an options trading journal to track their trades. Trading journals allow you to gather data about your trades which could then be mined to provide you with great insight that you will not be able to have otherwise.
At very minimum, you should be tracking the following data points:
- Entry Price: The price of the contract/share you paid to enter the trade.
- Exit Price: The price of the contract/share you paid to exit the trade.
- Entry Date: The date you open your position for the trade.
- Entry Time: The date you closed your position for the trade.
- Call / Put: Wether is a call or put.
- Position Size: The quantity of contract you bought or sold to enter the position.
- Strike: The strike price of the contract.
- Expiry Date: The date the contract expires.
Tracking this eight data points will get you enough insight into your trades for you to start understanding your performance. Still, we recommend you go beyond this eight data points and track the following:
- Setups:
- Strategy:
- Mistakes:
- Reason why you entered the trade
- Reason why you exit the trade
- Reason why you added to your position
Tracking these points together with the basic data points will give you enough data for you to start charting your performance and run correlation among your data to find out what you are doing right and wrong. These are very simple points to track. However, they go along way when trying to identify your options trading edge.
Let us help you get started with this free option trading journal excel file.