I posted a week or three back about trade tracking software. I have finally had a significant number of trades that needed tracking and was therefore able to put Wingman to see how it really works for my purposes. Whether it's the best or the most cost effective and those sorts of questions - I have no idea as I haven't tried anything else. I know that it didn't show up on any of the Best Of lists that I found.
What I've learned.
- Importing transactions for an account is straightforward. In fact I think I prefer their approach as it doesn't involve providing a user name / password. Instead I use my Investment history to identify the transactions starting at a custom date and download to a spreadsheet. Then there is an import function that knows how to read my particular format (and a half dozen or more common US brokerages) and imports those transactions. Easy and straightforward - probably the first important criteria to me.
- Once imported, at least so far, the app divies out the transactions as best it can figure out. This first round it didn't do all that well.
- Reassigning individual legs to higher level strategies / trades though was straightforward. I am hopeful that future imports will make better use of the transaction history and do a better job of assigning transactions, though I won't know for a week or two when I'll have another batch of transactions to import.
- I'm figuring out how to balance a trade with assigned strategy - do I just keep it rolling, adding new transactions as they arise (which happens with my semi-perma strangle). Or do I close out a transaction and start a new one when a particular leg finishes OTM? Still figuring this out.
- I HAVE figured out - in a particular account I'll only have 1 Covered Call strategy, and put all of the backing and option sales into that one strategy. I suspect that it'll just keep growing over time, but I'm not confident about that. At first I had 2 of these in my main account for the different purposes in my head about the positions - that was a mess, so I combined them.
- Cost is $50/month ($500 / year) and I've at least learned enough that I'm confident I'll pay for the second month (first month is a free trial).
- It's straightforward to get realized P/L for an account for a named month (i.e. May, June, ..). For a particular account of mine this has been my primary means of tracking forward progress.
- There is more analysis available, such as by strategy. I haven't used this yet.
After just a couple of weeks I'm pretty confident that I won't be going back to manual tracking.
I am still tracking my month to month macro progress and changes. But that's fast and easy - just a 1 liner for the month with maybe 10 cells to fill in, and they all come straight off my account summaries / totals.
What I've learned.
- Importing transactions for an account is straightforward. In fact I think I prefer their approach as it doesn't involve providing a user name / password. Instead I use my Investment history to identify the transactions starting at a custom date and download to a spreadsheet. Then there is an import function that knows how to read my particular format (and a half dozen or more common US brokerages) and imports those transactions. Easy and straightforward - probably the first important criteria to me.
- Once imported, at least so far, the app divies out the transactions as best it can figure out. This first round it didn't do all that well.
- Reassigning individual legs to higher level strategies / trades though was straightforward. I am hopeful that future imports will make better use of the transaction history and do a better job of assigning transactions, though I won't know for a week or two when I'll have another batch of transactions to import.
- I'm figuring out how to balance a trade with assigned strategy - do I just keep it rolling, adding new transactions as they arise (which happens with my semi-perma strangle). Or do I close out a transaction and start a new one when a particular leg finishes OTM? Still figuring this out.
- I HAVE figured out - in a particular account I'll only have 1 Covered Call strategy, and put all of the backing and option sales into that one strategy. I suspect that it'll just keep growing over time, but I'm not confident about that. At first I had 2 of these in my main account for the different purposes in my head about the positions - that was a mess, so I combined them.
- Cost is $50/month ($500 / year) and I've at least learned enough that I'm confident I'll pay for the second month (first month is a free trial).
- It's straightforward to get realized P/L for an account for a named month (i.e. May, June, ..). For a particular account of mine this has been my primary means of tracking forward progress.
- There is more analysis available, such as by strategy. I haven't used this yet.
After just a couple of weeks I'm pretty confident that I won't be going back to manual tracking.
I am still tracking my month to month macro progress and changes. But that's fast and easy - just a 1 liner for the month with maybe 10 cells to fill in, and they all come straight off my account summaries / totals.