How to Track Your Options Trades in Canada

Most Canadian options traders fall into one of two camps: they either don’t track their trades at all, or they build a spreadsheet that eventually stops being maintained. Neither approach produces the feedback loop that improves results over time.

This guide covers what tracking actually requires, what the common failure modes look like, and how to build a system that works.

Why Tracking Is Different for Options

Options tracking is harder than equity tracking because a single position involves multiple legs, dates, and metrics that equities don’t have. You need to capture:

• Strategy type — covered call, cash-secured put, iron condor, spread, etc.
• Strike(s) and expiry — not just the underlying
• Entry date and exit date — separately, since options have theta decay between them
• IV rank at entry — what the volatility environment was when you opened
• OTM% at entry — how far out of the money the position was
• Premium collected or paid
• Realized P&L — not your broker’s per-leg view, but the net on the full position

That last point matters. When you roll a covered call, your broker (Wealthsimple, TD Direct, Questrade — all of them) shows per-leg realized P&L. The buy-to-close on each roll shows as a realized loss. The sell-to-open credit is a separate entry. Your real options P&L is the sum of all legs, and no Canadian broker nets it for you automatically.

What a Spreadsheet Gets Right (and Wrong)

A spreadsheet works at first. You can capture every field mentioned above, build custom formulas, and pull whatever aggregate views you want. Most active options traders start here.

The failure modes are predictable:

You skip trades. Small positions, quick closes, and trades you’re not proud of tend not to get logged. Three months later your dataset only reflects the trades you chose to document — which skews every metric.

Formulas drift. You update one column’s formula and it doesn’t propagate cleanly. Your IV rank lookup was referencing end-of-day price instead of open price. You don’t notice until the data starts producing nonsensical numbers.

No aggregation layer. You have 200 rows of trade data and no clean way to filter by strategy, group by IV environment, or calculate rolling profit factor. You end up doing this manually each time you want to review performance.

The spreadsheet gives you data. It doesn’t give you insight.

The Three Metrics That Actually Matter

If you had to track only three things beyond raw P&L, these would be them:

1. Profit Factor by Strategy

Profit factor is gross profit divided by gross loss (absolute value). A 1.0 means you broke even. A 1.5 means for every dollar lost, you made $1.50.

The reason to calculate it per strategy rather than overall is that your covered calls and your iron condors may be performing very differently. A blended 1.3 profit factor can hide a 0.9 on condors and a 1.7 on covered calls. Disaggregated, that tells you something useful: where your edge actually is.

2. IV Rank at Entry

IV rank measures where implied volatility sits relative to its 12-month range. High IV rank means options are expensive relative to history — the selling environment is favorable. Low IV rank means options are cheap — premium sellers are working against the wind.

If you’re systematically opening positions at IV rank below 30, you’re selling into low volatility. Your collected premium is thin, your breakevens are tight, and you’re exposed to IV expansion. Tracking IV rank at entry across your real trades shows whether your entry timing has been consistent with your stated strategy.

3. OTM% at Entry

OTM% measures how far your strike was from the underlying price at the time you opened. For a short put at $45 on a stock trading at $50: OTM% = (50 − 45) / 50 = 10%.

Across 6 months of trades, your average OTM% at entry reflects how aggressive or conservative your strike selection has been in practice — not in theory. Many traders who believe they’re being conservative (selling “way OTM”) find their actual average is much closer to the money than they assumed.

Broker Import vs Manual Entry

For Canadian traders, two paths to getting your history into a tracking system:

Questrade API import — Questrade has a developer API that returns your full options transaction history. A personal access token (read-only, generated in ~2 minutes in Questrade’s API portal) allows pulling up to 6 months of activity. StrikeRate’s Questrade import uses this to auto-populate your trade history and calculate IV rank and OTM% on every entry. Full walkthrough here.

Manual entry — For Wealthsimple Trade, TD Direct Investing, National Bank Direct, IBKR Canada, or any other broker: manual entry of each trade takes about 45 seconds per position. IV rank and OTM% are calculated automatically from your entry date — you don’t need to look them up.

The Right Comparison

Once you have six months of data, the most valuable thing to look at isn’t how your results compare to the S&P 500 or to another trader. It’s how your last 30 trades compare to your previous 30.

Is your profit factor improving? Is your average loss size growing or stable? Are your high-IV-rank entries actually outperforming your low-IV-rank entries the way the strategy theory says they should?

That self-comparison is the feedback loop that compound improvements. And it’s only possible if you’ve been tracking consistently.

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Start tracking your options trades on StrikeRate — free account, manual entry for all brokers, Questrade import for Pro. Setup takes about 5 minutes.