Options Trading Journal: What I Track on Every Trade (Free Template)

Here’s a question for you. Last month, which of your options strategies actually made you money? Not roughly. Exactly.

If you can’t answer that, you need a trading journal. I was in the same spot. I was trading options every week, mostly selling, and I couldn’t clearly see what was working, what wasn’t, and what my shares had really cost me after all the premiums. So I started journaling every trade, and eventually built my own journal for it.

In this guide I’ll show you what I track on every trade, how to handle the tricky part, assignments, and I’ll give you my free options trading journal template so you can start today.

Why every options trader needs a journal

Treat your trading like a business. A business keeps books. Your journal is your books.

• You see what really works. Tag every trade with its strategy, and after a month you’ll know if your cash-secured puts are carrying you while your spreads lose money.
• You stop repeating mistakes. Write down why you closed early, why you rolled, why a trade went wrong. Patterns show up fast.
• You know your real cost basis. When you sell puts and calls on the same stock, the premiums lower what you really paid. Your broker doesn’t show that. Your journal does.
• Tax time gets easier. I talk about this in my options taxes guide. A clean record of every open, close and roll saves a lot of headaches.

What to log on every trade

Keep it simple, or you’ll stop doing it. When you open a trade, log:

• Date, ticker and strategy (cash-secured put, covered call, credit spread, LEAPS…)
• Action: sell to open, buy to open (and later, buy to close or sell to close)
• Option type, strike, expiration and number of contracts
• Premium collected or paid

When you close it, log the closing price, the outcome (closed early, expired, assigned or rolled), the realized profit or loss, and one line of notes.

That’s the example from my video: sell to open a TSLA 450 put this week for $170, close it a few days later for $20, and the journal shows $150 realized. While a trade is still open, it counts as unrealized, so you can see what’s potentially coming in that week.

The tricky part: assignments and your real cost basis

This is what most journals get wrong, and it’s the main reason I built my own.

When your cash-secured put is assigned, you don’t buy it back. You’re forced to buy 100 shares. So in your journal you close the put at $0 with the outcome “assigned”, and then those shares show up in your portfolio at the strike price.

But your real cost isn’t the strike. The premium you collected lowers it. And every covered call you sell on those shares lowers it again. Here’s a full wheel cycle from my template:

Your broker still shows something close to $50. Your journal knows it’s $46. That matters, because it changes which covered call strikes are safe to sell. You never want to sell a call below your real cost. I explain that in covered calls on Robinhood.

Tap through the full cycle to see how each trade gets logged:

Get my free options trading journal template

I’ve put all of this into a simple template you can use right away. It has the columns I track and the full wheel cycle above as an example, so you can see how each row works.

Download the free options trading journal template (CSV)

It’s a plain CSV file. Open it in Google Sheets (File → Import), Excel or Numbers, delete the example rows, and start logging. Add any columns you like. Some people track the stock price at entry, delta, or how they felt about the trade.

When you outgrow the spreadsheet

A spreadsheet is a great start. But after a few months of weekly options, it gets messy, especially with assignments, rolls and cost basis across many tickers. That’s why I built my own options journal, OptionsVault.

It’s built for option sellers: covered calls, cash-secured puts and the wheel, with your premium and P&L broken down by strategy, so the spreadsheet work above happens for you. You can start for free. In the video I walk through how I log trades, close them and handle an assignment in my journal.

My weekly journal review

A journal only helps if you look at it. Every weekend I spend ten minutes on this:

Start small. Even if you only log the basics, you’ll know more about your trading in a month than most people do in a year. If you have ideas for what a journal should track, put them in the comments on the video. I’m still adding features, and a lot of them come from you.

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