Short selling, a trade log beside the chart, and portfolio beta

Until this batch, a short trade you'd already made at your broker had nowhere to go here. Traders who shorted were entering the legs as an ordinary Buy and Sell with the meaning inverted — which records the money but tells the journal a lie about the position. Every derived number downstream inherited that lie.

Shorts are now a first-class position in your book. A sell can open a position rather than close one; the position runs negative while it's open; a buy-to-cover closes it; and realized P&L runs the direction a short actually runs — the result improves as the price falls. The stocks grid labels the direction, and a short round trip shows the sell as its opening date and the cover as its close.

Your broker file brings them in

Import a statement with short trades in it and they arrive as shorts — no re-entering them by hand. Since the setting starts off, the preview tells you it spotted short sales and asks before turning it on. Decline and those rows stay out, rather than landing as something they weren't.

Both legs in one form

If you already know both prices — and day traders usually do — you can record the whole thing at once. The stock dialog gained a “also record the close” toggle that takes the exit alongside the entry, in either direction: a buy with its sell, or a short sale with its cover. Single-leg options got the same treatment — closed at a price, or expired worthless, without opening the dialog twice.

Reviewing a trade used to mean three visits — the chart on one page, your note on another, the day's journal entry on a third. Now it's one screen: Trade Notes has a cards ↔ table toggle, and the table lists every trade — date, ticker, session, setup, direction, entry, stop, target, R:R and result in R — not just the ones you annotated.

Cards are unchanged for anyone who liked them. And the chart never gets covered up: clicking a row opens the detail beside the table rather than on top of it, so nothing redirects and no modal lands over the thing you're reading.

The review pane

Select a row and a review band opens above the table: the context candle chart large on the left, and on the right the trade's own note — editable in place — plus that day's Daily Journal entry, read-only, with a link through to edit it. Three surfaces that used to be three visits, on one screen, hydrating as you move down the rows.

Risk in R, on stocks too

Options carried a stop loss and a target already; stock trades had nowhere to put them. Now they do. The stock dialogs take a stop loss and take profit when you open a trade — or later, on the edit form, if you'd rather annotate after the fact — and the table derives R:R and the realized result in R from them. Session comes free: each row is tagged pre-market, regular hours, after-hours or overnight from the fill time.

A run of small options gaps closed in this batch — each one a thing you could do at your broker but not record here afterwards.

Log a partial close

Close part of a trade and keep the rest running. Bought back four of ten short puts? The four become a closed trade with their own realized result while the six stay open — so a staged exit reads as a staged exit instead of forcing you to choose between closing early and closing all of it. Every P&L surface picked it up without a special case, and a scaled position keeps the strategy label it started with.

One-click expiry, and an undo

Marking a contract expired used to open a dialog that had nothing to ask you. It doesn't any more — expiry is one click. Multi-leg positions can expire as a whole, so an iron condor that ran to Friday is one action instead of four. And both are reversible: Reopen puts a trade or a position back to open if you clicked too early — including a spread that only half-expired, which previously had no way back.

P&L % your way

Options P&L % has always been return on collateral: what the trade returned against the capital it tied up. For short premium, plenty of traders read it the other way — what share of the credit you collected did you keep? Sell at 2.00, buy back at 0.50, and that's +75%.

Both are now available. Pick Return on collateral or Trade ROI in Settings, per account, and it applies everywhere the number appears — the options tracker, recent activity on the dashboard, Trade Notes, and the average in your performance ledger. Collateral stays the default, so nothing moves unless you move it.

Index options, handled as cash-settled

Index options don't deliver shares, so offering to assign or exercise one was offering nonsense. Index roots are now recognized as cash-settled: those actions are hidden on index contracts in both menus, no phantom share position appears behind them, and the wheel correctly declines to open a cycle on something that can never hand you stock.

Columns that answer the obvious question

• Days Left, next to DTE — DTE is the days to expiry the trade had when you opened it, which is the number you sized the trade on. Days Left is the countdown from today. Two different questions, two columns.
• Adjusted debit — what a position has cost you net of the premium collected against it, rather than the raw debit you paid on day one.
• Paste a contract symbol — paste a standard option symbol into the ticker field and the strike, expiry and side fill themselves in. Works on single-leg and multi-leg entry.
• Fix a strategy label — if detection called your structure something you disagree with, you can now correct the label instead of living with it.
• Default commissions — set a per-contract options fee and a flat stock fee on the account, and entry forms fill them in for you, scaled by contract count.

Your win rate tells you how you've traded. It tells you nothing about how exposed you are right now — whether a bad week in the market would graze your book or take a chunk out of it. Portfolio beta answers that, and it needs nothing from your broker beyond what you've already recorded.

Beta measures how much a holding tends to move when the market moves. A beta near 1 tracks the market; above it, amplified; below it, damped. Roll that up across what you hold and you get a single read on how much market risk your book is carrying — the thing that explains why a “safe” portfolio can still lose a tenth of itself in a week.

Stocks and options are measured separately, and deliberately so. Share weights are solid — shares times mark. Option weights need delta-adjusted notional, and delta is an optional field, so blending the two into one authoritative figure would launder a confident-looking number out of a soft input. You get both, each with its own coverage, plus an approximate combined figure clearly marked as such.

Index options are included through curated proxies, so an index position contributes real exposure instead of vanishing from the total. And beside the beta sits your combined book exposure — how much market you're actually facing across shares and contracts together, which is often the more sobering of the two numbers.

If you run more than one account, the app has always made you check them one at a time. Total red or green across the lot meant arithmetic on a notepad. There's a page for it now.

Pick All accounts at the top of the account switcher and you get a combined overview: realized P&L across the book, a cumulative P&L chart with every account merged, a row of highlights — win rate with the record spelled out, profit factor, average win and loss, trades, open positions, capital deployed, annual ROI — and a table giving each account its own line, with a total that reconciles to the tiles above it.

Every other screen stays on a single real account, which is the point — the overview is for the question “how am I doing overall?”, and clicking any account takes you straight into that account's dashboard to answer everything else. Two things stayed out on purpose: hold time and peak capital, neither of which survives being added up across accounts.

A handful of numbers that were technically correct and practically useless got fixed this batch.

Hold times that work below a day

If you scalp, or trade zero-DTE, every hold time in the app read “less than a day” — which is true and tells you nothing. Hold time now adapts to the book it's describing: a scalper sees minutes, a swing trader still sees days, and nobody has a toggle to find. Same trades, a scale that fits them.

Your best and worst tickers

The ticker report now opens with a ranking — the names that have treated you best and the ones that have treated you worst, by realized result. The list is regularly a surprise: the ticker you consider your bread and butter and the one actually carrying the account are frequently not the same name.

Live prices outside regular hours

Latest price used to go stale the moment the bell rang. It now follows the session you're actually in — pre-market, regular hours, after-hours, and overnight — so unrealized P&L on an open position keeps meaning something at 7am and at 8pm, not just between 9:30 and 4.

Enter a trade where you noticed it

Looking at a day on the P&L calendar and realizing you never recorded something is a common way to find a gap. That day now carries a New trade launcher — stock, single-leg or multi-leg — opening the right dialog with the date already filled in.

What's behind “Deployed”

The deployed-capital figure on the dashboard is a click target now, opening a per-position breakdown: every open option position with its collateral, every held ticker with its remaining basis, subtotaled to the number in the headline. It reconciles exactly, including under the stocks-only and options-only filters.

The largest single body of work here isn't a feature — it's imports, again, and it doesn't photograph well. Most of these five weeks went on auditing real broker files line by line and fixing whatever didn't reconcile. What that buys you is boring and important: the money that lands in your book matches the money in the file.

• Two more brokers recognized on drop — Wealthsimple and M1 now auto-detect, and several brokers gained a second format: Interactive Brokers activity statements, TradeStation confirms, Fidelity order history, Schwab positions, tastytrade activity. Files that hold no executions at all — a backtest export, a holdings snapshot — are now recognized and rejected with an explanation, instead of being mapped into something wrong.
• Spreads stay spreads — imported multi-leg positions were dissolving into loose single legs, which then read as unrelated trades and could invent wheel cycles that never happened. They arrive grouped now, and there's a repair path for books that already took the hit.
• Option splits and adjusted contracts — when an underlying splits, the contracts rescale. Imports handle that now, including the case where a contract stops representing 100 shares.
• Covered calls find their shares — an imported call written against a holding links to that holding on the way in, and you can correct the link afterwards if it guessed wrong. Wheel cycles get built from imports the same way they do from manual entry.
• Import only the tickers you want — a searchable ticker filter on the preview step, with counts. Useful for a statement spanning years when you only care about ten names, and it makes an oversized file importable in slices. Cash movements stay unaffected, and re-importing the whole file later converges rather than duplicating.
• Three steps instead of four — the Map step is skipped whenever the mapping is already clean, which for a recognized broker file is every time. There's an “adjust column mapping” escape hatch on the preview if you want it back.
• Better answers when something is off — overlap checks with what you already hold now run on the server, warnings show their detail on the first step rather than the last, and rows that were skipped, unsupported or excluded are itemized instead of counted. You can also create an account right on the import screen, and importing two different broker accounts into one is now blocked.
• Transferred-in shares — stock that arrived by transfer rather than purchase can carry its opening basis, so a transferred position doesn't start life at zero cost.
• Broker-by-broker money fidelity — exact share prices instead of rounded averages, option fees that were being dropped, transfer and wire fees, dividend reversals, and reinvestments that were posting as phantom income. Unglamorous, and it's the difference between a book that reconciles and one that nearly does.
• Send us a screenshot — support chat takes images and CSV files now, so “this row imported wrong” can come with the row attached.

Can I journal short stock trades now?

Yes. A sell can open a position, the position runs negative while you're short, a buy-to-cover closes it, and realized P&L runs the direction a short runs. It's an account-level setting that starts off, so you switch it on for the accounts where you short and nothing changes on the others.

Will turning on short selling change my existing trades?

No. The setting only changes how a sell with no shares behind it is interpreted from that point on. Existing positions, their basis, and their P&L are untouched, and with the setting off a sell you can't back with shares still gets flagged rather than becoming a short.

Can I close part of an options position?

Yes. Enter how many contracts you're closing and the closed portion becomes its own completed trade with its own result, while the remainder stays open. The position shows how many contracts are still live, and every P&L view treats the staged exit as a staged exit.

What's the difference between DTE and Days Left?

DTE is the days to expiry the trade had when you opened it — the number you sized the position on, and it never changes. Days Left counts down from today to expiry. Both columns are available because they answer different questions: one about the decision, one about the clock.

What does R mean in the trade log?

R measures a result against the loss you had planned to accept — your entry to your stop is 1R, so a winner that ran three times that far is +3R. It lets you compare trades of different sizes on the same scale, and it needs a stop recorded, which stock trades can now hold.

Does the all-accounts overview convert currencies?

No, and deliberately. Accounts are grouped by currency and no total crosses a boundary — you get a section per currency with a note saying nothing was converted. An invented exchange rate would make one clean number out of two accurate ones.

Where do I follow changes between release notes?

We ship most days and post the moment-to-moment on X, then gather a run of releases into one write-up like this. Follow @tickerscribe for the running play-by-play, watch the blog for each batch, and find walkthroughs on YouTube.