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Getting started
What The Iron Wheel does, the four building blocks it is made of, and your first campaign end to end.
What this app is — and is not
The Iron Wheel is a record-keeping and analytics tool. You enter your trades, or paste them in from your broker, and it answers the questions a spreadsheet stops answering once you have more than a handful of positions:
- How much have I actually made on this position — realized and unrealized?
- What is still open, and what is it worth right now?
- How much capital is this tying up?
- Where does it break even, and what does the payoff look like across a range of prices?
- Across everything I run: what did I earn this week, this month, this year?
It does not connect to your broker, place orders, or move money. Nothing here is investment advice, and every figure is derived from data you supplied — reconcile against your broker's statements before you act on anything. See the risk disclaimer.
The four building blocks
| Thing | What it is |
|---|---|
| Campaign | One strategy, on one underlying, run over time — TLT wheel Q3,
MSFT PMCC. Everything else hangs off a campaign. |
| Trade | A single transaction inside a campaign: buy or sell, stock or option, with a quantity, a price, a date and a commission. Dividends are recorded here too. |
| Position | Not something you enter — it is derived from the trades. Options are unique per symbol, strike, expiration and type; stock is just the symbol. Buy three contracts and sell one, and you hold a position of two. |
| Portfolio | A named group of campaigns — usually one per brokerage account
(IRA, Margin). Every account starts with a
Default portfolio. |
The important consequence of that third row: you never edit a position. You record what you did, and the position, the P/L and the risk all follow from the trade history. If a number looks wrong, the fix is always in the trades.
Your first campaign, end to end
- Create it. New Campaign asks for four things: a name, a strategy type, an underlying, and a portfolio. The underlying box autocompletes from the list of supported tickers — if yours is missing, ask for it on the support page. The strategy type is a label: it drives grouping and reporting, not the maths, so pick the one that describes your intent and change it later if the position evolves.
- Get the trades in. Type them one at a time, or paste a block straight out of your broker's trade log into the bulk-import box — the new-campaign form has one, and so does every campaign page. See Recording trades.
- Read the campaign page. Open positions with live prices, unrealized P/L, delta and time value; break-even prices; a 60-day candlestick chart of the underlying; and an optional P/L profile showing the payoff today and at expiration. See The campaign page.
- Close the loop at expiration. The Expire button on an open option position does the whole ritual in one click: it closes the option at $0 on its expiration date and, if it finished in the money, records the resulting share assignment or exercise at the strike.
- Watch it from the dashboard. Every campaign on one screen, grouped by portfolio and strategy, with P/L, capital, days to expiration and a pink row when something needs your attention. See The dashboard.
Before you start entering a year of history
Two settings change how every subsequent trade is recorded, so they are worth two minutes up front on the settings page:
- Default commissions — $/contract and $/share with a per-trade minimum. Anything you enter without an explicit commission picks these up. Commissions are baked into the cost basis, so setting them afterwards will not retro-fit trades already recorded at $0.
- Dividend tax rate — prefilled when you record a dividend, overridable per entry.
The capital requirement model (Reg-T or TIMS) can be switched at any time; it is a display choice, not stored per trade.
Where to go next
- Campaigns and portfolios — how to slice your trading into campaigns without regretting it later.
- The Wheel and PMCC — the two strategy guides, each with the exact sequence of entries.