Hi! First time poster here! I am with IB for a while and I am trading options. So let's assume buying a Put option and after some time you want to make it a Vertical Debit Spread (or any other strategy) Could anyone explain me how to scale into a strategy/add a leg with an existing opened option position? Appreciate any help! Michael
First, sell your long put, ASAP. Second, do your homework. 10+ years ago, IB had some of the best, non-bullshit webinars around. (Not 100%, but pretty close.) I just went and checked for you and yes, there is still a webinar page. It's chockful of source material on TWS, Mosaic, phone stuff, market stuff, currency stuff, investment/portfolio stuff, and indeed, options stuff. https://register.gotowebinar.com/register/6972872249238142211 Spend a week watching/re-watching webinars. Options; options trading on TWS. Take notes. I used to recommend a great guy named Russell Rhoads http://www.cboe.com/blogs/author/russell-rhoads but anything connected to the cboe or oic should be sound. The answer to your question is to sell any strike further away from the market than your long. Even if you bought the put for $1.00 and it was now 50¢, any strike further away will be <50¢, and the combination would be held by you as a credit, and would be purchased from you as a debit.
Thanks for your answer, I really appreciate it I am aware of the risks and how to construct an option strategy; I was just wondering IF there is an possibility through booktrader, optiontrader, scaletrader, etc. to make it look like a combi position with the + on the left side if you are legging. I know you can simply buy/sell 1, 2, 3,.. leg(s) to an existing open option position, but than you do NOT see the + on its side. (Its more an estetical issue) As an illustration i added some screenshots of positions with and without +.
I don’t think this is possible, but it can be helpful to create a watchlist where you manually add such legs and then can move/arrange them to be below each other, so that you can have a better overview of your related positions.
BTW, you can also configure some rows as headers/groupings, as well as configure your columns to make it look more like a portfolio with specific positions:
yeah that is looking very good; I was playing around with watchlists today to get a better overview, thanks for the input!