P/L, capital and break-even

Four numbers do most of the work in this app. This page says exactly what each one means, so that when one surprises you, you know where to look.

Realized P/L — FIFO, net of commissions

Realized P/L is profit on closed lots, matched first-in-first-out. Buy one contract at $1.00 and another at $1.50, then sell one, and the $1.00 lot is the one that closed — regardless of which one you were "thinking of".

• Commissions are baked into the lot price, not subtracted afterwards. A contract bought at $1.00 with $0.65 of commission has an effective basis of $1.0065 per share. Realized P/L is therefore already net of fees, and there is no separate cost line to remember.
• Shorts work the same way in reverse. Selling opens a short lot; buying it back closes it. Premium sold shows up as profit when the short is closed, expired or assigned — not on the day you sold it. This is the single most common surprise: a fat credit collected today reads as $0 realized until the contract goes away.
• Dividends are tracked alongside, not inside. Cash booked is shares × $/share × (1 − tax%), shown as its own figure on the campaign page and included in Total P/L.

Unrealized P/L — open positions, marked to market

Each open position is valued at its current mark against its cost basis. Prices come from a market data feed and are held in a short-lived cache (minutes), so figures can be a little stale and are occasionally missing entirely for illiquid contracts. The dashboard renders from the cache first and refreshes live in the background.

Total P/L = realized + unrealized + net dividends, over the campaign's whole life.

Capital requirement

The Capital column on the dashboard and Total Capital on the campaign page answer "what is this campaign tying up". Two models are available; pick one in Settings and it applies everywhere. Both value a campaign in isolation — there is no netting across campaigns, which is deliberately conservative and matches how you would reason about the position itself.

Reg-T — margin-account rules

The model most retail margin accounts actually run on:

• Stock, long or short, at 50% of market value.
• Short calls are covered by long stock first — a genuine covered call costs nothing extra.
• Remaining shorts pair with longs of the same type into spreads, where a long can only cover a short that expires on or before it. A pair costs its adverse strike width plus any net debit: a credit spread costs the width, a PMCC costs the capital you actually deployed.
• Unpaired long options are paid in full.
• Anything still naked uses the standard formula — 20% of the underlying for equities, 15% for broad-based index options — less the amount out of the money, with a 10% floor, plus the premium.
• The option total is then capped at the structure's true maximum loss, so butterflies, condors and hedged structures are not charged twice for the same risk.

TIMS — portfolio margin

A stress test rather than a formula. Every leg is repriced across a grid of underlying moves — ±15% for equities, −8% to +6% for broad-based indices — and the requirement is the worst loss in that grid, floored at $37.50 per short contract. It usually charges less than Reg-T for hedged structures and more for anything with a genuine tail.

Both are computed and stored on every trade write, so switching the setting changes the display instantly. If no cached underlying price is available, both fall back to a conservative cost-basis estimate. As always: your broker decides your real margin, and it will not match to the dollar.

Break-even

The break-even is the underlying price at which the position's payoff is zero. It is solved, not looked up in a table of formulas — the payoff is worked out leg by leg and the price where it crosses zero is found on the curve. That is why it stays correct for structures that have no textbook formula, and why the number in the header lands exactly where the P/L profile crosses zero.

• Break-even — the open position alone.
• With realized — the same curve shifted by the profit you have already banked. For a wheel you have rolled six times, this is the number that tells you where you actually stand.

Option pricing uses Black-Scholes-Merton with implied volatility from current marks, a continuous dividend yield and a risk-free rate, both stored per underlying. When a break-even shows as n/a, the usual cause is a missing implied volatility for one of the legs.

The P/L profile

Two curves for the same position: today (dashed), with all remaining time value priced in, and at the earliest expiry (solid), where the nearest leg settles and longer-dated legs keep their remaining time value. The vertical distance between them at the current price is the time value you are waiting to collect.

Note the header break-even and the profile answer the same question on the same model, so they agree. On a single-expiry campaign this is invisible; on a PMCC, where the LEAPS has months left when the short dies, the difference between "hold everything to expiry" and "mark at the earliest expiry" is real money, and the app consistently shows the latter.

When a number looks wrong

1. Check the trades, not the number. Everything is derived; there is nowhere else for an error to hide.
2. Check the price scale. Option prices are per share. A contract entered as 107 instead of 1.07 is off by 100×, and it will look like a huge P/L swing.
3. Check the dates. FIFO matches in time order, so a mis-dated trade closes the wrong lot.
4. Check for a missing close. An option that expired but was never recorded as closed stays open forever, dragging unrealized P/L and capital with it.
5. Reconcile against your broker. Their statement is the authoritative record — see the risk disclaimer.