Key ideas in five minutes

A few ideas come up on every page of MyTraderDash. Knowing them makes the rest of the app easy to read.

Accounts

An account in MyTraderDash stands for one account at your broker: your TFSA at Questrade, your margin account at tastytrade, and so on. Every trade belongs to exactly one account.

You create accounts on Accounts & Data with Add Account. For each one you pick:

• Broker: where the account is. Pick Other if yours isn't listed.
• Account Type: cash, margin, or a registered / retirement type such as TFSA, RRSP or Roth IRA. Tax-exempt types are left out of the tax report by default.
• Currency: USD, CAD or both.

The sample data lives in an account named DEMO. Clear Demo Data on Accounts & Data removes it. See Your first login.

Trades and positions

A trade is one line from your broker: a buy, a sell, a dividend, an option that expired.

A position (the app also calls it a trade group) is what those trades add up to: all the buys and sells of one stock, or of one option contract, in one account. MyTraderDash builds positions for you by matching sells against the oldest buys first (first in, first out).

• A position is open while you still hold something, and closed once it's all sold (or bought back, for a short).
• Its profit or loss is worked out from all its trades, including fees and dividends.

The Trade Log shows both. The Grouped view lists positions; click the small arrow at the start of a row to see the trades inside it. The List view lists the trades one by one.

You can also group trades your own way, for example to keep a long-running position together. See Merge, move and unmerge trades and Trades and positions.

Strategies are detected for you

You don't label your strategies. MyTraderDash looks at your trades and recognizes common ones by itself, such as:

• the wheel (selling puts, getting assigned, then selling calls on the shares)
• covered calls and cash-secured puts
• LEAPS (long-dated options)
• dividends from your holdings
• Norbert's Gambit (converting currency by journaling shares)

The Strategies page shows how each one is doing. Detection runs again every time you import or change trades. See How strategies are detected.

Tags are just labels

Tags are short labels on positions and trades, for filtering and finding things. You can add and remove them freely.

The app adds a few tags itself as hints. For example, trades that an import wasn't sure about are tagged needs-attention so you can look them over. Removing a tag never changes how a trade is counted: tags are for you, not for the math. See Tags.

Display currency

Every trade keeps the currency it was made in. If all your trades are in one currency, that's all you see.

Every page with money on it shows its currency at the top. If you trade in both US and Canadian dollars, that becomes a USD | CAD toggle: totals such as profit and loss, position returns and dashboard figures are converted to the currency you pick, on that page. The Display Currency switch on Accounts & Data sets the one every page opens with. See Currencies.

Nothing here is advice

MyTraderDash shows calculations based on the data you give it. It doesn't recommend trades.

• The sample trades are made up.
• The screener templates are examples, not suggestions.
• The tax report is a starting point. Check it against your broker's tax documents, and ask a tax professional when in doubt.

If a number looks wrong, the cause is usually missing or incomplete data. See Find and fix data issues.