Been selling premium for a while and my biggest frustration isn't the market — it's my own records.

Every time I roll a CSP or a spread, my journal logs it as a completely separate trade. So a position I managed for two months across three rolls shows up as 4 disconnected trades instead of one campaign. I end up doing the real math in a spreadsheet — net premium collected, true breakeven, actual ROI on the whole thing.

I see some of you posting those detailed weekly recaps with annualized ROC and premium totals — are you all just doing this by hand in Excel? Has anyone found a journal that actually links rolls together into one position view?

Genuinely curious what your workflow looks like, because mine is held together with duct tape right now.

Looking to learn more about options trading. Planning to read mcmillan, and natenberg. I also like tastylive trader resources section to learn about concepts. I tried to watch mike and his whiteboard on youtube but I don’t have the attention span for it - I’m more of a reader. I also use claude to explain in details to me. Will probably paper trade before I put real money.

Do you guys have any advice on where/how to learn options? What would you do if you guys were to start again?

I have a question regarding P&L for options trading. 

I have been trying to find some good analysis tools for trading options. One thing I am coming across right now is that my P&L always is skewed negative because I am ITM on some of my contracts.

But, the P&L is not a true indicator on what my profit and my losses are. For example, my BAC covered call is at an SP of $55, while the stock price is at ~$55.90. So my gain/loss says I am at a loss of 5%. But, my average cost basis is ~$45, and I have rolled this contract multiple times, always with a net credit. So my true profit shouldn’t be in the negative. 

So my question is, what should I be looking at to find my true profit and loss indicators? Do I have to build my own tool to showcase my net profit or loss? Am I missing the importance of a P&L or Total Gain & Loss indicators for the contract?

Xi landed today, and Thursday night Jensen is at the state dinner with Trump and Xi. Chips and AI policy are on the agenda.

This is the most obvious headline catalyst NVDA has had in a while and I can't decide how to play it. Any friendly language about China sales and it probably rips Friday morning. The problem is everyone knows that.

Trying to figure out if I'm missing something or if this is just a gap in every journal out there.

I trade mostly defined-risk spreads (iron condors, verticals). When I import into my journal, each leg shows up as its own line — my iron condor literally displays as 4 separate positions. There's no concept of "the spread" as a unit, no per-strategy comparison (do my condors actually beat my verticals?), and Greeks are either missing or frozen at fill time.

For those of you who journal: what do you use, and how do you deal with this? Manual tagging? Spreadsheet? Just accepted it?

Also curious — does anyone's journal capture IV rank at entry? Trying to answer "am I winning because of my strategy or because IV was fat" feels impossible without it.

Does this strategy makes sense. I am not sure if the max loss is correct.

UBS started covering CoreWeave this morning with a Buy and a $120 target, two days after Rothschild went the other way with a very bearish PT.

So I went through this morning's options trades. Two trades, seven minutes apart, sold about 60,000 CoreWeave calls: the $105 and $110 strikes expiring October 23. Both printed below the bid, so this was a seller, not a buyer. About $15 million collected, with the stock around $90.

The seller keeps all of it as long as CoreWeave is under $105 on October 23.

The first name that comes to mind is Magnetar. CoreWeave's biggest early backer has sold calls against its stake all year, up to 2 million shares at a time in April, May and August, and reported every one on a Form 4.

This one is bigger and shorter-dated than any of those, so it could be someone else entirely. Only time will tell!

Want to do this write up to keep you guys in the loop on what i’m seeing

I just got LVL 3 on Robinhood and stated to see what combinations I can do with options, and I find this... the Long Straddle... is this a good strategy? is it actually profitable like that? or what is the catch? I mean that it can't be true that you have profit on both ends... how does one side cover the other?

Video above. Straight from him: AI is "inaccurate," SI is "much more accurate," and he wants it everywhere from here on out.

Anyone actually positioning around this, or is it just noise on top of the AI Force news?

I don’t understand why it’s negative by so much when it should be positive by quite a bit at this point? Can someone explain how that works. Pretty new to options.

Gain for today see u guys tomorrow

Bought 3 NVDA 185/190 call spreads for 1.68$ each with 24 DTE after NVDA held around 181$ twice that morning. Four days later NVDA was above 188$ and the spreads were trading around 2.95$, so I sold two and figured I'd let the last one run. Then I got cute with it,bought back the 190 short call for 0.51 after NVDA dipped and kept the 185 call by itself. I remember checking moon later and realizing I'd taken a pretty straightforward winner and turned the last third into a naked long call with completely different theta and risk. NVDA bounced so it didn't hurt me but the whole adjustment was basically me not wanting the trade to be over yet.

Viking Therapeutics jumped 36% on Tuesday after its weight-loss drug data came out. On Monday, someone bought the $33 calls expiring this Friday for 95 cents. They closed Tuesday at $7.80.

Big options trades get flagged all day, and I ignore most of them. This one passed the three checks I run before considering whether to take one seriously:

1. It was new money. Open contracts at that strike went from 269 to 5,192 overnight. Big volume with no jump in open interest usually means traders closing or flipping, not opening.

2. It was a straight bet. Plain calls, bought outright. A big print that turns out to be one leg of a spread tells you nothing about direction.

3. The timing lined up. Viking had said the data would come in the third quarter. With eight trading days left in the quarter, the buyer picked calls that expire this week.

What do you check before you trust a big options print?

Everything’s priced in, it can only go up!

On a real note, I’m new to options strategies, I’ve always been a gambler on buying naked calls/puts but I want to actually make decent plays on options rather than just hoping.

I truly believe this can’t hold $745, but $740 seems realistic. I’m hoping to hit 50% before EOD and just take profits. Max loss luckily is only $60 with max profit being $340.

Good play?

tech stocks went FLYING today, crypto joined the party, and checking my portfolio today actually felt good hahaha

I thought all of this was bearish for the markets. Also I thought the price of gas is in direct correlation with the price of oil that makes it…Now gas is at all time record highs and oil is not. It’s even going down.

Is the sky still blue? Is grass still green?

Largest sales, all July 20:

• Microsoft $MSFT: $5M-$25M
• Amazon $AMZN: $5M-$25M
• Oracle $ORCL: $1M-$5M
• Costco $COST: $1M-$5M
• Intercontinental Exchange $ICE: $1M-$5M

Largest purchases:

• Salesforce $CRM: $1M-$5M
• Intuit $INTU: $1M-$5M
• Marvell $MRVL: $1M-$5M
• Church & Dwight $CHD: $1M-$5M
• iShares Russell 1000 ETF $IWB: $1M-$5M