Thirteen languages, a risk history, how-to guides, and a faster app

TickerScribe was English-only. For a product whose users import statements from brokers on four continents, that had become the oddest gap in it.

The app now runs in thirteen languages: English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish, and Chinese in both Simplified and Traditional. Not a corner of it — every screen, every dialog, every empty state, every validation message.

What's translated, and what isn't

One scope note. The blog, this post, the Help guides, the changelog and the legal pages stay in English for now — they're long-form prose rather than interface copy, and they follow on their own schedule. If a string anywhere reads wrong in your language, tell us and we'll fix it.

Dates and numbers deliberately keep their existing formatting rather than shifting per language. A book you've been reading for months shouldn't re-punctuate itself because you switched the interface to French.

The dashboard could tell you how much capital is deployed now and roughly how much market your positions carry now. Neither told you whether today was typical. Were you heavier in March than you are in September? Did your exposure creep up across a run of wins? There was no way to look.

Risk history is a new page that replays your book day by day and draws two charts from it.

How much capital was actually working

The first chart is capital utilization — the share of your account that was deployed on each day, rebuilt from your own trades rather than sampled from a snapshot. Stretches where you sat mostly in cash read as troughs; a month where you were fully committed reads as a plateau. Click any day for the breakdown behind that point.

How much market it was carrying

The second chart is beta-weighted exposure, and it reads as a share of your portfolio rather than an amount — with a 100% line marking the point where your book moves roughly one-for-one with the market. Above that line you were carrying more market than your portfolio size; below it, less. Stocks and options are both in it, and stretches where there's no usable price history are shaded rather than drawn as if they were flat.

A long run of options gaps closed in this batch. The theme: things that happen to a position at your broker, which you then couldn't record here afterwards without faking it.

Settle a whole position at expiration

Expiration rarely resolves a spread cleanly. One leg expires worthless, another gets assigned, a third you closed early. Previously that meant three separate actions on three legs, each guessing at the right one. Settle at Expiration takes the whole position in one pass: say what happened to each leg — expired, assigned, exercised, or closed — and the position resolves together, with the assigned shares landing in the right stock position and the premiums attributed where they belong.

Assign or exercise one leg

Assignment used to be all-or-nothing on a multi-leg position: the Assign and Exercise actions were hidden unless the position was a single leg. Now a leg can be assigned or exercised on its own while the rest of the position stays open and keeps running. The short put in a strangle can go to shares without disturbing the call.

Clear the expired backlog in one pass

If you'd been away from the app for a while, past-expiry contracts piled up and each needed its own visit. There's now a Review expired options pass that gathers every contract whose expiry has gone by, shows you which ones were in the money at the close — so you don't expire something that was actually assigned — and lets you confirm the batch in one action. Anything you expire by mistake can be reopened.

Break-even as its own column

Break-even was available in a tooltip; it's now a column you can switch on in the Options tracker, sitting with the rest of the position's numbers. It reads the premium-adjusted break-even — the strike moved by the premium you actually collected or paid, not the textbook one. The same number, plus P&L %, now also comes out in the CSV export.

Where the underlying was

Option rows can now carry the underlying stock price at entry, at close, and at a roll — optional, in its own collapsed section beside Greeks and the risk plan, so nothing gets wider if you don't use it. Broker files bring it in where the statement has it. It's the field that makes “how far out of the money was I when I opened this?” answerable after the fact.

Close a spread at a net price

You close a vertical for a net debit or credit — that's the number in your head and the number on the confirmation. The Close Position dialog now takes it that way: enter the net and the per-leg prices are derived for you, or stay in per-leg mode if you prefer. It also warns when the two leg prices look swapped, which is the mistake that quietly inverts a result, and totals the close before you commit it.

Group and ungroup positions

Legs that should have been one position — and positions that should have been separate — can now be regrouped by hand. Useful after an import that read a multi-leg order as separate contracts, or when you legged into a spread across two days and want it to read as the one strategy it became.

“Up 12%” is only meaningful against something. Against your starting balance? Against the most you ever had deployed? Against a benchmark? This batch added the two measures that make the question answerable, and let you pick the third.

Return on the capital that was working

Beside the realized P&L figure at the top of the dashboard there is now a Period ROC chip — a return measured against your time-weighted average capital, — the capital that was genuinely deployed across the window, weighted by how long it was deployed for. A month where you were fully committed for a week and in cash for three doesn't get judged as if the whole balance had been at work throughout.

A return that survives deposits

Beside it sits a deposit-adjusted account return. Adding money to an account makes the balance go up without you having done anything clever, and a naive percentage happily reports that as performance. This one weights deposits and withdrawals by when they landed, so funding your account doesn't read as a good month.

A benchmark you choose

Everything that compared against the market compared against the S&P 500, which is the wrong reference for a book of small caps or one that's all technology. You can now set the benchmark per account — S&P 500, Nasdaq 100, Russell 2000 or the Dow — and it follows through everywhere the comparison appears: the dashboard chart, the beta-weighted numbers, and both charts on the risk history page. It's a chip on the charts themselves rather than something buried in Settings.

Importing a decade of statements used to mean pressing a button and watching nothing happen for a long time, with no way to tell a slow import from a stuck one.

Large imports now run in batches, behind a counter that tells you how many rows have landed as they land. If something fails partway, what already went in stays put and the run picks up where it stopped rather than starting over. The practical effect is that big files stopped being a gamble.

Four more brokers recognized on sight

Trade Republic, E*TRADE, Alpaca and XTB joined the set of brokers whose exports are detected and mapped without you touching a column. Several formats you already use gained variants too — realized gain/loss and order-status exports, account statements and activity files that previously needed the manual mapper.

Some of this product needs explaining. Not the buttons — the concepts. Why a covered call's premium changes your break-even but an assigned put's premium changes your cost basis. What happens to your position when a split lands. Why an option that expired and an option that was assigned are different endings with different money.

There's now a Help section with ten guides covering exactly those: break-even, option endings, positions and grouping, stock splits, short selling, settling a multi-leg position, cash and balance, importing, import troubleshooting, and accounts and preferences.

More usefully, the dialogs link into it. When you're in the Assign dialog wondering what assignment does to your basis, the answer is one click away rather than a search away. Each guide ends with a “was this helpful?” so we can tell which ones are missing the point.

Over the past month the amount of data TickerScribe holds grew more than a hundredfold. So a good part of this batch went into performance — and the result is that the largest books now open at very nearly the speed of the smallest ones. Nothing about how you use the app changed; it just stopped making you wait.

• The Average Price Calculator, rebuilt — averaging into a position (DCA) now has a proper planner, built around two questions. Build a ladder takes several planned buys and shows the capital each one needs and the average price after it, one step at a time. Reach a target average runs the other way: name the average you want to end up at and it solves for the size that gets you there.

  

• Record a closed round trip alongside an open position — you can log a trade you opened and closed years ago in a ticker you currently hold, without the historical entry disturbing the live position's basis. The two sit side by side and stay separate.

  

• Duplicate a trade — copy any trade or position into a new entry with everything carried across. For anyone who runs the same structure week after week, it removes most of the typing.

  

• Tags, with a filter — a Tags column on the options and stocks trackers, plus a filter that narrows the table to the tags you pick. Chips are clickable, and a spread stays whole when its tag matches.

  

  

• Fractional shares to eight decimals — brokers that fill in tiny fractions no longer get rounded on the way in, so a position built from dozens of fractional buys adds up to what the broker says it does.
• Captions on journal screenshots, and five of them — journal entries and trade notes take up to five images each, and every image can carry a caption so a screenshot from three months ago still says what it was showing.
• Positions in the ticker report — the per-ticker report now shows the positions behind the numbers, not just the aggregate, with cleaner dates throughout.
• Portfolio beta reads shorts correctly — a short position reduces your market exposure, and the beta calculation now treats it that way instead of adding its magnitude.
• Sorting that holds — sortable columns on the options and stocks trackers behave consistently now that sorting happens server-side, including on the columns that derive their values.
• Steadier sessions — a transient network blip while your account loads now retries instead of leaving you on an empty screen, and the app recovers from a dropped connection rather than asking you to reload.
• Edited support replies — messages in support chat can be corrected after sending, so a wrong answer gets fixed in place rather than followed by three corrections.

Which languages does TickerScribe support?

Thirteen: English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish, and Chinese in both Simplified and Traditional. The whole app interface is translated. The blog, Help guides and legal pages stay in English for now.

Will the app switch language on its own?

No. We don't read your browser's language setting — it stays English until you explicitly pick from the globe in the header or from Settings. Visiting a translated marketing URL doesn't change your app either. Once you pick, the choice follows you across the site, the sign-in pages and the app.

What does the risk history page show?

Two charts rebuilt from your own trades, day by day: how much of your capital was actually deployed, and how much market your positions were carrying as a share of the portfolio, with a 100% line for reference. Click any day for the breakdown behind that point.

Can I settle a spread where the legs ended differently?

Yes — that's what Settle at Expiration is for. Say what happened to each leg (expired, assigned, exercised or closed) and the position resolves in one action, with assigned shares landing in the right stock position. Individual legs can also be assigned or exercised on their own while the rest stays open.

Can I compare against something other than the S&P 500?

Yes. The benchmark is set per account — S&P 500, Nasdaq 100, Russell 2000 or the Dow — and it applies everywhere the comparison shows up, including the dashboard chart and both risk history charts. It's a chip on the charts rather than a Settings page.

Why did my pages get faster?

The amount of data TickerScribe holds grew more than a hundredfold over the past month, so a good part of this batch went into performance. The largest books now open at very nearly the speed of the smallest 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.