The Fields an Options Journal Actually Needs
Which fields change a future decision, and which just make the spreadsheet look thorough.
Course contents73 lessons · 28 questions
Search for an options journal template and you will find spreadsheets with thirty columns. Most people fill them in enthusiastically for six weeks, then start skipping the tedious ones, then stop entirely — because a journal that takes four minutes per trade to complete and is never read is a chore with no payoff.
A journal earns its place only if the fields in it change a future decision. That is the test this lesson applies to every column.
Ten fields, and four that are decoration
Toggle any field to see what it buys you or what its absence costs. The Core set is the minimum that keeps every metric in this course computable.
Toggle a field to see what recording it buys you — and what its absence costs.
These ten fields are enough to reconstruct every metric in this course, including blended returns across a rolled chain. Everything beyond them is optional.
The ten that matter
Six are simply the trade: ticker, strategy, strike, expiration, open date, and the actual fill price. Without these you have not recorded a trade at all.
Two are the ones people skip and later regret. Fees are trivial per trade and material per year — leave them out and every return figure is quietly optimistic. The link to the leg a roll replaced is the field that turns a pile of tickets into a reconstructable chain.
Two are strategy-specific. Delta at entry is the most valuable optional field in premium selling, because it lets you compare strike-selection rules across months rather than relying on impression. Underlying cost basis is required for any covered-call figure to mean anything at all.
The ones that quietly cost you
How you felt. Universally recommended and almost never acted upon. If you genuinely review emotional patterns and change behaviour as a result, keep it. Most people do not.
Price targets. Premium selling is not a directional forecast. Recording a target implies a thesis the strategy does not have.
A long free-text thesis. Valuable in principle, abandoned by week three in practice. One short line — “would own at this price” — survives; a paragraph does not.
IV rank at entry. Genuinely useful, but only if you actually run the review that uses it. Worth adding once your journal habit is established, not on day one.
What never to type in
| Field | Derive from | If typed, breaks when… |
|---|---|---|
| Days held | Open and close dates | Anything is corrected |
| Annualised return | Net, capital, days | The position is rolled |
| Capital at risk | Strike × 100 × contracts | Contract count changes |
| Premium captured % | Credit and current mark | Every single day |
Fields that should be formulas, and what breaks when they are typed values instead.
The review is the point
A journal that is written and never read is a filing system. The value appears at the quarterly review, and the questions worth asking are narrow:
- Which delta band actually got assigned, and how often?
- Did closing early beat holding, on the trades where I did both?
- How much did fees and spreads take this quarter?
- Which underlyings produced most of the losses?
Every one of those is answerable from the ten core fields, and none of them from the decorative four. That is the whole argument.
What can go wrong
Too many fields. The journal stops being maintained, which costs more than any missing column.
Recording intentions rather than fills. See slippage.
Typing derived values. They rot silently.
Never reviewing. The single most common failure, and it makes the whole exercise pointless.
Key takeaways
- A field earns its place only if it can change a future decision.
- Ten fields cover everything: the six that define the trade, plus fees, roll linkage, entry delta and underlying basis.
- Record what cannot be reconstructed later; compute everything that can.
- Never type derived values — annualised return and days held go stale the moment anything changes.
- The quarterly review is the product. A journal nobody reads is a filing system.
Check your understanding
1. Which optional field is most valuable for a premium seller?
2. Why should annualised return be a formula rather than a typed number?
3. What is the most common reason options journals fail?