New to all this, using Think or Swim and just started doing some paper trading (options). I'm trying to understand how to read the "monitor" page properly. Mostly trying to understand my account balances and current trades. Most of the numbers seems to be in (brackets), which I understand to be a negative numbers, do these only become positive (if done correctly) once the Option is closed/expired? Thanks!
the monitor page has several modes - activity and position, acct statement,etc. Where are you seeing these brackets. and I assume you mean parenthesis () not brackets which are [ ] ?
Yes, parenthesis. The numbers I'm most interested in understanding are the ones under: P/L Open P/L Day P/L YTD I know what the columns all mean (Profit/Loss etc) I'm just trying to understand exactly what the numbers I see mean.
P/L Open is current market price - your entry price P/L Day is for open positions and = current price - yesterday's closing price. P/L YTD is p/L Open + p/l Closed trades. I look at net liquidating personally so I might be slightly off on the above explanation so other seasoned TOS users, please feel free to correct me.
Not sure if these pictures will help at all, but these are the numbers I see. I guess what I'm trying to figure out, is there any real point in looking at these numbers on a daily basis or should I just ignore these till either I a) close the option or b) it expires? A couple of them expire tomorrow (weeklys) so I'm sure I'll know at that point if I executed the option the way I intended (it doesn't lose money), but have been trying to understand the numbers all week. I'm not planning to do any day trading at this point, just learning/trying to understand some basic options to get started. Thanks for the help!
so.. for instance, the $-262.5. This means you opened a position and currently is down $262 from last night's closing prices. The next pos down which is +$3.9k shows that you are making $$ on it BUT is giving back $312 today. The dayPnL is useful because it is marked to market from last night's close.. giving me a heads up as to what is going on TODAY vs yesterday. Think of it as "starting fresh " every day using last night's prices as entry points.
After doing a bit of thinking/review, turned out the reason everything seemed/looked wrong to me is because it was...I setup my options wrong...good learning experience and thankful it was just in paper trades! Thanks again for your insight.