Questrade Options Trading: Tracking Your P&L Beyond the Platform

Questrade is the most popular options platform for Canadian self-directed traders — and for good reason. The commissions are competitive, the options chain is functional, and multi-leg spread entry works better than most Canadian alternatives.

What it doesn’t show you: anything across trades.

You can see that you made $340 on SHOP last Tuesday. You can pull up the P&L on a SU covered call you closed in March. But you cannot see your average win size, your profit factor by strategy, or whether your results are better or worse in high-volatility environments. That data doesn’t exist anywhere in the Questrade interface.

This is the gap between execution platform and trading edge — and it’s where most active options traders in Canada hit a wall.

The Spreadsheet Phase

Most active Questrade options traders eventually build a spreadsheet. It starts simple: ticker, strategy, entry date, exit date, P&L. Then it grows. IV rank at entry, delta, days to expiry, underlying direction.

The spreadsheet works until it doesn’t. The failure modes are predictable:

Data gaps accumulate. You skip logging a trade because it was a small position or a quick close. Three months later, your dataset is biased toward trades you chose to document — which skews every metric you calculate from it.

Calculated columns drift. You change an IV rank formula in one cell and it doesn’t propagate. You realize six months later that your lookup was using end-of-day close prices instead of open prices. The data looks consistent but isn’t.

No aggregation layer. You have 200 rows of raw trades but no clean way to filter by strategy, group by IV environment, or look at rolling 30-day profit factor. You’re staring at raw data without the analysis layer that would make it actionable.

The spreadsheet gives you your trades. It doesn’t give you your patterns.

What Questrade’s API Provides

Questrade has a developer API that provides historical activity data. The API returns:

• Transaction date and time
• Option symbol (which encodes underlying, expiry, strike, and call/put type)
• Open or close direction
• Quantity and fill price
• Commission

This is everything needed to reconstruct your complete options history. The API is accessed with a personal access token — a read-only credential that can view your account history but cannot place trades.

The token lasts 30 days and needs to be refreshed monthly. Setup takes about two minutes in Questrade’s API portal.

Importing Your Questrade History into StrikeRate

StrikeRate’s Questrade import is a Pro feature that pulls up to 6 months of options activity directly from the API.

The process:

1. Generate a personal access token in Questrade’s API portal (Settings → Apps → Create token)
2. Paste the token into StrikeRate’s broker import screen
3. StrikeRate pulls your complete options transaction history
4. Matched pairs — an open leg and a close leg on the same position — are automatically recognized as closed trades with realized P&L calculated

The import typically completes in under 30 seconds for 6 months of activity.

Your Questrade token is stored only in your browser’s localStorage. StrikeRate never persists brokerage credentials on its servers.

What You Get After Import

Once your history is imported, StrikeRate builds your analytics automatically:

IV Rank at Entry. For every trade in your imported history, StrikeRate looks up the closing IV rank on your entry date. You see, across 6 months of real trades, what IV environments your entries clustered in — and whether higher-IV entries actually outperformed. This is data your broker has never shown you.

OTM% at Entry. How far out of the money were you at the moment you opened each position, expressed as a percentage of the underlying price? Questrade records the strike and the fill price. It doesn’t record the underlying price at your exact entry moment, which means it can’t calculate this metric. StrikeRate derives it from the underlying’s closing price on your entry date.

Win rate and profit factor by strategy. Your covered calls, cash-secured puts, iron condors, and strangles each get their own performance summary. You’ll often find strategies you thought were performing similarly are actually quite different when the data is disaggregated.

Geographic performance map. A heatmap showing where your P&L came from geographically — useful for spotting sector concentration you didn’t realize you had. Canadian traders often have heavy energy, financial, and materials exposure that the map makes immediately visible.

After the Import: The First Questions to Ask

With 6 months of real data in front of you, here are the most valuable questions to start with:

What’s my profit factor overall? This is gross profit divided by gross loss (absolute value). Anything above 1.0 means you made money. Above 1.5 is a meaningful edge. Below 1.0 means you lost money despite whatever your win rate looks like.

Does my profit factor differ between strategies? You may find that your covered calls are at 1.4 while your cash-secured puts are at 0.8. The same underlying, the same market conditions, different structure. That data tells you something about which of your approaches actually has an edge.

Do my high-IV-rank entries outperform? The standard options selling playbook says they should. Your data may confirm or contradict this — and the answer might differ between your single-stock positions and the ETFs you trade.

Manual Entry for Other Brokers

If you use Interactive Brokers, TD Direct Investing, National Bank Direct, or another broker without direct StrikeRate integration, manual trade entry provides identical analytics. Each trade takes about 45 seconds: strategy, underlying, strikes, expiry, entry date, exit date, fill prices.

IV rank and OTM% are calculated automatically from your entry date — no manual lookup required.

The Comparison That Matters

The goal of trade analytics isn’t to compare your results to an index or to another trader. Markets vary, strategies vary, risk tolerance varies. A 65% win rate in options selling doesn’t mean the same thing across two different traders.

The comparison that matters is you over time: are your last 30 trades performing better than your previous 30? Is your average loss size increasing or stable? Is your profit factor for covered calls trending up as you refine your entry criteria?

That self-comparison is the feedback loop that actually improves trading. And it’s impossible to run without data.

Import your Questrade history on StrikeRate — free account to start, Questrade import unlocks with Pro. The import takes about 30 seconds. Your analytics populate immediately.