A trade log that tells the truth

A trade log is the only instrument you have for finding out whether what you're doing works. Brokerage statements show what happened; a log records what you intended, what you assumed, and what it cost, so that the next decision can rest on something better than a feeling. The fields below are the ones that earn their space. The last section is about the ones that don't.

At entry

• Date, underlying, and the structure: short put, covered call, put credit spread.
• Strike or strikes, expiration, number of contracts.
• Credit received per share after commissions and fees, and the fill relative to the mid, which is how much of the spread you paid.
• Stock price, implied volatility, and the stock's IV rank at the time.
• Days to expiration and the delta of the short strike.
• Notional at risk, or maximum loss for a defined-risk trade, in dollars.
• One sentence on why: the actual reason you took this trade instead of not taking it.
• The plan: profit target, the price or loss at which you'll act, and the date you'll manage if nothing else has happened.

At exit

• Date and how it ended: expired, closed, assigned.
• Debit paid to close, if any, and the fill relative to the mid.
• Realized profit or loss in dollars, and as a percentage of the risk figure from entry, not of the premium.
• Days held.
• What happened versus the plan, in one sentence. Did you follow it, and if not, why.

Recording a roll

Two rows. The first closes the original trade at whatever it cost to buy back, with the realized result. The second opens the new option with its own entry fields. A roll recorded as one row reading "net credit $0.50" erases a loss and inflates every summary statistic the log produces.

Recording an assignment

The put's row closes as "assigned" with no separate profit or loss; its premium becomes part of the shares' cost basis. Open a row for the stock position at that adjusted basis, and give any covered calls sold against it their own rows. When the shares are finally sold, the stock row closes and the whole sequence can be summed. That sum is the truth about the wheel, and it's the number a premium-only view hides.

The fields that flatter you

Total premium collected: it ignores buybacks and share losses, only ever goes up, and feels like progress. Win rate on its own: a 90% win rate with an average loss five times the average win is a losing strategy, and the win rate will never tell you. Return on premium, "kept 60% of the credit," instead of return on the capital at risk. Annualized returns on short trades, where a 2% week becomes "104%." Unrealized losses on assigned shares kept off the log because "the put trade is finished." Each of these is a real number reporting on a fiction.

The monthly questions

Once a month, the log should be able to answer: What's the total realized profit or loss, including the stock outcomes? What's the average win, the average loss, and their ratio? Which underlyings and which structures made money, and which lost? How did trades entered at high IV rank compare with those entered at low? How often did I follow the plan, and what happened when I didn't? What was the largest loss, and how many average wins does it take to cover it? If the log can answer those in ten minutes, it's doing its job. If you have to guess at any of them, the missing field is the one to add.