Choosing Somewhere to Keep the Record
Criteria, not a ranked list. The five things that matter and the one nobody checks.
Course catalogue99 lessons
Most journals are built for directional trading: enter, exit, record the result. Premium selling breaks that model in specific ways, and a tool that cannot handle those ways will quietly produce wrong numbers rather than refusing to answer.
What the record needs to hold
Before evaluating tools, know what you need stored. Toggle fields to see what each one lets you answer later, and what becomes unanswerable if it was never captured.
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.
Five tests that separate tools
1. Does it link a roll to its parent?
The single most important question. A roll closes one contract and opens another, and a tool that treats them as unrelated trades will report a rolled-for-a-loss position as a loss followed by a new position. Losing the cumulative result entirely.
The test: record a position, roll it twice, and ask the tool what the position has earned in total. If it can only tell you about the current contract, it does not model chains. See recording a roll correctly.
2. Does premium carry into cost basis on assignment?
A put assigns at $95 after collecting $2.50. Your basis in the shares is $92.50, not $95. A tool that records the assignment as an ordinary stock purchase at $95 has broken the link between the option and the shares.
Everything downstream is then wrong: your break-even on the covered call you write next, your realised profit when you sell, and your sense of whether the cycle worked.
3. Can it report a full cycle as one thing?
Puts, then shares, then calls, then a sale. Months, three instruments, one economic position. Ask the tool what that cycle returned. If the answer requires you to add up screens, it is a trade log rather than a position tracker, see tracking a full cycle.
4. Is the import faithful?
Manual entry does not survive contact with a real trading month. Automatic import is the difference between a record you maintain and one you abandon.
The test is not whether import exists. It is what happens to the awkward cases. Assignments, exercises, expirations, multi-leg orders, partial fills, and corporate actions are where importers fail, and they fail silently. Import a month you already understand and reconcile it line by line before trusting it with a year.
5. Can you get your data back out?
The one nobody checks. A tool holding several years of trade history that will only export a summary PDF has you locked in, and if it shuts down, your record goes with it.
Look for full CSV export of raw trades, not reports. Test it on day one, not on the day you want to leave.
| Test | How to check |
|---|---|
| Links rolls to parent | Roll twice, ask for cumulative result |
| Carries basis through assignment | Assign a put, check share cost basis |
| Reports a full cycle | Run a wheel, ask what it returned |
| Imports the awkward cases | Reconcile a known month line by line |
| Exports raw data | Export on day one |
The five tests, in order of how much damage failing one does.
Things that matter less than they appear
Chart variety. Twenty visualisations of a wrong number are still wrong.
Live pricing. Your broker already has it. A journal's job is the record.
Social features. Unrelated to whether the accounting is correct.
Price. Within the normal range, the accounting differences dwarf the subscription differences. The wrong tool at half the price still produces wrong numbers.
Know what you need first
Evaluating tools before knowing what you want recorded produces a decision driven by screenshots. Work out the fields first, see what belongs in the record, then check which candidates can hold them.
If your activity is simple enough, the answer may be a spreadsheet, and that is a legitimate outcome.
What can go wrong
Evaluating on the dashboard. The accounting sits underneath it.
Trusting import without reconciling. Failures are silent.
Not testing export. Check it before you have years of data inside.
Choosing on price. The differences that matter are not priced.
Key takeaways
- Ask whether the tool links a roll to its parent. It is the single most discriminating test.
- Check that premium carries into share cost basis on assignment, or everything downstream is wrong.
- Reconcile an imported month line by line; importers fail on assignments and multi-leg orders silently.
- Test full CSV export of raw trades on day one, not on the day you want to leave.
- A tool that cannot link rolls does not warn you. It shows a confident, incomplete number.
Check your understanding
1. What is the most discriminating test when evaluating an options journal?
2. Why is a tool that cannot handle assignment particularly dangerous?
3. Why test data export on day one?
Related lessons
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