A spread is one decision, so it should be one row in your journal. Turn on Multi-leg in the option contract card and a trade can carry two to eight legs — a vertical, an iron condor, a straddle, a calendar, or anything you build by hand.
Building the structure
- On the trade entry page, set Asset to Options, then tick Multi-leg.
- Pick a named structure from the strategy menu (Basic · Spreads · Advanced · Custom) and the legs are laid out for you around the current price, with theoretical prices to start from.
- Edit any leg — side, call/put, quantity, strike, premium, expiration — or add and remove legs freely.
- Replace the theoretical premiums with what you actually paid or received on each leg.
What gets recorded
The legs are the source of truth, and the order ticket is derived from them:
- Entry price is the net premium of one combo — a net debit or a net credit.
- Side follows the cash: a net debit books as a Debit, a net credit as a Credit. (A structure is neither long nor short — an iron condor is just one or the other kind of premium.)
- Combos replaces the contract count — four condors is four combos, not sixteen contracts. Type the number you traded and every leg scales with it (a 1×2 ratio becomes 4×8).
- To close, enter the net premium you paid or received to unwind as the exit price. P&L is (exit − entry) × combos × 100, the same arithmetic as a single contract.
- Commission is charged per leg: a per-contract rate on a four-leg condor bills four contracts per combo, per side.
The option plan card
In multi-leg mode the plan card shows the combined picture: every break-even (a condor has two), max profit, max loss, the payoff diagram for all legs together, and position delta, gamma, theta and vega. Legs with time still left on the front expiry are valued with a Black-Scholes estimate, so calendars and diagonals model honestly instead of collapsing to a straight line.
Filling a leg from the live chain
Once the trade has an underlying symbol, every leg gets a chain button. It opens the live chain for that leg and fills the strike, expiration and premium — using the price you would actually transact at: the ask when the leg is a Buy, the bid when it's a Sell. (Taking the mid instead would understate the cost of every leg, four times over on a condor.) The column that will be used is highlighted, and the header shows which leg and side you're filling.
A note on implied volatility
Chains quote an implied volatility on every contract, but it's only meaningful where there's a real market. Far out-of-the-money strikes quoted at $0.00/$0.01, and deep in-the-money ones with very wide spreads, produce figures like 250% or 0% that no one would trade at. Ledger of Alpha models the position at the chain's at-the-money volatility whenever a contract's own quote is implausible against it, and tells you when it has done so. In the Options tool, picking a symbol adopts that ATM volatility for the expiry you're modelling — you can always type your own over it.
The per-leg chain browser opens on that leg's own expiry. If a leg is dated to a month the chain doesn't list, it opens on the closest listed one — you are never dropped on the front weekly while modelling a longer-dated leg.
Why volatility needs the price you paid at
A leg's premium is what you paid on the day you entered. To turn that back into an implied volatility, the same day's underlying price is needed — reading an old premium againsttoday's price mixes two different moments and reports a volatility the trade never had. So Ledger of Alpha records the underlying price at entry alongside the structure, and solves each leg's volatility against it. Picking a contract from the chain captures that price for you.
Trades recorded before this existed have no price stored, so their Option Plan card falls back to today's price and shows a Vol approx. badge. Break-evens, max profit and max loss are unaffected — they come from the strikes and premiums, not from volatility. Only the Greeks are estimated. To remove the badge, open the trade and re-save it with the underlying price it was entered at.
Modelling before you trade
The Options P&L tool runs the same engine with a few extras: it takes a symbol (pulling the live price and the same per-leg chain browser), accepts share legs (covered calls, collars), and adds a P&L heatmap — profit and loss across underlying price and date, so you can see the position on the way to expiry rather than only at it. Both the price range and the date range on that grid are editable.
Limits
- Eight legs maximum, all on the same underlying.
- Structures with a share leg (covered call, collar, reverse conversion) can be modelled in the tool, but the shares are recorded as a separate stock trade.
- Pre-expiry values, greeks and any theoretical premium are estimates from a standard model — not quotes.