New Trade Graph Feature on ORAD

Written on August 20, 2008 by OptionsRopeaDope

One of the goals I have had for this blog is to become more “self aware” of my trading and the markets through transparency of my trading decisions. It has worked and my methods and understanding of major principles such as risk management and portfolio diversification have been pushed to another level. A picture is always worth a thousand words though, and I’ve lacked a way to get alot of the metrics that I track into visual, graph like form.

Any designer or report writer will tell you that displaying information graphically has a real purpose, namely allowing the reader to process a large amount of data very quickly. Done correctly, it also provides the proper context. So after monkeying around with Google Spreadsheets for a couple of weeks, I think I’ve come up with a way to track alot of my individual trade and risk metrics over time. As a preliminary example, here is a trade (a RUT Iron Condor) I opened on Monday:

 (It looks a bit sparse after a couple of days because of the lack of info… over the course of 2 or 3 weeks it will look much better). It may be a little confusing at first glance, just realize that price (of the underlying), implied volatility, and profit are all relative to a starting value. Why? Two reasons - to make sure everything can fit on the same scale, and to fit in line with the way I’m calculating the greeks, which is to have a method of tracking profit without regard to the absolute size of the position (ie, I want this to work no matter if I am trading with 1 contract, or 1000) Here is each element:

Profit: calculated as current profit (in $) divided by my max loss for the position

Price: Uses the close for each day, and the first day is set at 0. Changes afterwards are % changes of the underlying from that day.

IV: Treated the same way as price.

RRDelta: The RR Delta on that particular day. Since I calculate RR Delta as a %, this value is absolute. Don’t ever want this to get over .4 or .5 (or below -.4 or -.5).

RRVega: Treated just like RRDelta.

I think this will make my position updates a little more interesting if I keep these going. And it meets my goal of allowing me to scale up in position size, and use the same rules for trade management. And Google spreadsheets is great for tracking this, as it automagically fills in the date and colsing price every day since the start of the trade.

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Posted in Real Trades, Trading Rules, Misc