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Hey everyone, Kirk here again and welcome back to the daily call from optionalpha.com. On today’s daily call, we are going to talk about how to track your option trades and why you should keep a trading journal. I will first say this. I realized 100% that tracking trades is a big problem in this industry. In fact, I’m surprised and very happy at the same time because we have an opportunity to fill this gap. But I’m surprised that a lot of brokers are pretty bad at this. Now, most brokers have the ability to track trades like your open profit, your total profit, your daily profit, etcetera and they still keep a very nice ledger for you at the end of the year of all the trades that you’ve done. But what we’re talking about here is actually tracking associated trades and tracking trades that are associated together with adjustments, with different strike prices, with different tickers, different strategy types, etcetera. Like for example: My broker right now is Thinkorswim. Thinkorswim has a really good tracking program for just actually listing out all the trades. But when we actually make an adjustment, there’s no way for me to say to Thinkorswim or for it to know, “Hey, this adjustment actually was associated with this original entry.” Or, “Hey Thinkorswim, show me all the iron butterflies that I’ve traded because sometimes, I might enter an iron butterfly in two different orders and I might exit it in a strangle order by just closing out the inside legs.” But they don’t know that. And so, that’s really hard to go through and track that. Now, we built software for ourselves to actually track that a long time ago. It’s not the best software because it was just kind of basically not thrown together, but it was as needed at the time. I’ll start out this whole thing by saying we are in the process, very deep in the process already of building out software that will hopefully make this a lot easier for you guys in the future. It’s going to be a software that takes a lot of time to build because we have to integrate with all these different brokers and basically make 10 different broker languages funnel into one system. But the goal is that eventually, what you’ll be able to do is login to Option Alpha, connect to your brokerage account via a secure API connection and every day, it will basically filter in all your trades and you will tag and associate them as needed. We’re trying to make this as minimal as possible, but also very powerful in that we want you to figure out or have the ability to see what types of strategies you win on more often, what your average holding period is, your average credits, your debits. I mean, like all the stuff that most broker platforms just frankly don’t track that we do. We do it for our account because we have an API connection to Thinkorswim already. We’re now starting to publish that and starting to see how we can make that more of a mainstream software product for you guys. I will let you know. I realize and I totally acknowledge that it is a problem in this industry and we are trying to solve that problem. Now, what can you do in the meantime? I know there’s a lot of Excel documents out there. A lot of our members inside of our pro and elite forum have posted their Excel documents or link to their Excel documents. That’s probably a really good place to start. If you’re not great with Excel, you probably just want to keep it very simple. I’ve seen some pretty insane and crazy Excel documents floating around. But that is a valid way to actually track different trade associations. What you would do is you would download the Excel spreadsheet of your trades, maybe you do it once a week or once a month and then you would tag or add new columns to tag and associate trades together, have a bunch of rules and a bunch of filters that would help total everything up in different sections of the Excel document. Again, not the easiest way to go by any stretch, but definitely is an option to see how you’re doing and to track your progress. Another thing that you should be doing is you should be keeping just a trading journal. Now for me, my trading journal thankfully is the Option Alpha website. When I do these podcasts or do strategy calls or nightly video updates, I’m keeping a journal of all the stuff that I do. You guys would be actually surprised to know that I go back all the time and re-listen to my own thoughts on the markets say six months or a year ago or my own thoughts on a trade six months or a year ago. I’m actually very interested in seeing how I progress personally as a trader and my thought process changes or not or stays the same from time to time. And so, you should be doing that yourself in whatever medium you think that that’s helpful for you. I have heard of members keeping a trading journal that’s audio version, so downloading like an audio app. I know there’s a bunch of audio apps out there that are like personal journals that don’t go anywhere, it’s not shared on social media, it’s just shared for yourself. That’s a great way to do it, just journaling your thoughts or how you’re reacting to a stock moving against you or a position moving against you. But I’ve often kept a notepad and paper journal as well. Now, I don’t keep that as often today, but sometimes I do jot down notes and thought processes about particular extremes in the market. Like one example of this just a couple of months ago was EWZ. It had a 15% crash overnight. We ended up trading EWZ that day. But I remember writing down some notes in my journal about how I felt during that time and what I was thinking when EWZ was crashing. It was like a political scandal, so is this different than any other crash or just all the same, just a different catalyst? I think that it’s important to jot down those things. It clears your mind anyway just to get that off your plate. But it helps you when you go back and relive some of these situations and maybe you realize maybe you were too aggressive on yourself or maybe you thought something was going to happen, you were too doomsday-ish and didn’t look on a different light or didn’t see a different angle of this. I think it’s really helpful. Like I said, hopefully you guys have some ideas or suggestions on this. I’d love to hear on Facebook or Twitter or social media how you guys track your trades. Don’t be afraid or don’t be shy to actually post up there and let me know. I definitely like to see how some more people are tracking their trades and what features you might be interested in with our portfolio-tracking software that we’re building. If you have any suggestions on that, please keep them a short bullet point list and send them over to me and shoot me an email. I’ll definitely be interested in seeing that for sure because we’re building it for you guys. Until next time, happy trading!