Great question. I call this "planned versus actual." I like to enter into each expiration cycle with a clear cut plan that literally has a bottom line profit projection for each day of the month, especially expiration and the end of the last calendar day. I do this in a spreadsheet and it's a chore. A chore I'm doing this evening in final preparation for August and to "wrap up" July because I wait until I get "Sunday" numbers if any trade begins or ends on a Saturday (or "end of day" Friday and I don't get a fill on the order.)
Here's two products that were recommended to me as trading journal solutions. I'd also suggest you raise the question with tos (and please post their reply here.) I think if you look at the information in the monitor tab and use OnDemand, well, that's all I do to go back and review each trade and keep my journal up to date when I miss a few sessions and need to bring the documentation up to date. You might also question a bigger, more mature platform vendor like TradeStation or Interactive Brokers (which has portfolio performance and risk management tools.)
Here's Barron's on the brokers:
It's also worth reading the comments on the article for a discussion of the clearing houses and equity risk with SIPC.
On Sun, Aug 1, 2010 at 6:02 AM, Ricky Jimenez
<rickyjim@bestweb.net> wrote:
Suppose you are entering a trade which you plan to modify on a daily
basis. It could be a backtest, paper or real money trade. What is
the best way to keep track of the history of the daily positions? Of
course you would want the cummulative position, total credit or debit
and P/L including closed positions, at each day in the trade and maybe
a way to automatically generate the expiration graph for any date. Has
anybody cobbled together something using the TOS platform and Excel?
--
Adam
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