Core concepts

Positions & P&L

Once an order fills, it becomes a position. The positions view shows what you hold, what it's worth, and how it will pay off across the range of SPX prices.

What a position tracks

Each position aggregates your fills for one instrument and direction, and reports:

Direction & quantity Long or short, and how many contracts
Cost basis The price you opened at
Current price The live mark from the option chain
Delta Recomputed on every time change
P&L Unrealized, realized, and total

Positions are computed live from your trades and the market data at the session's current time — advance or rewind the clock (in practice) and they update.

Position delta and sign

In the option chain, delta is displayed as a magnitude (the underlying value keeps its sign). On a position, your direction supplies the sign: long calls have positive delta, short calls negative — and the reverse for puts, so long puts are negative and short puts positive. Summing delta across all your positions gives your net delta — a quick read on your directional exposure.

Toggle legs of a sample iron condor in and out: a balanced book sits near zero — delta-neutral — and leans directional the moment one side is missing.

0.00Δ delta-neutral — balanced either way
Net delta sums the four rows into one number. Deltas here are illustrative; a live position reads exact Greeks per leg.

P&L

Unrealized P&L Mark-to-market gain or loss on positions still open
Realized P&L Locked-in gain or loss from positions you've closed and from settlement
Total P&L Unrealized + realized − fees

When you close a position, its result moves from unrealized into your realized total. P&L is also broken out by equities vs equity options.

While a position is open its gain is unrealized; closing moves the same amount into realized — the total is unchanged, less fees. Flip the switch to watch it move.

Unrealized P&L +$450
Fees −$9
Total P&L +$441
Open: the gain is unrealized, marked to market and still moving. Close the position and it becomes realized. Total P&L = unrealized + realized − fees.

The payoff chart

The positions screen plots a payoff diagram — your profit or loss as a function of the SPX price, for your current set of positions. It makes the shape of a strategy obvious at a glance: the flat profit zone and capped wings of an iron condor, the breakevens of a vertical, the unlimited slope of a naked option. As the clock advances, the curve reflects the decaying time value of your 0DTE options.

Here's the shape for a 1-lot iron condor that sold the 5920/5900 put spread and the 5980/6000 call spread for a combined $4.50 credit. Drag the credit and widths to reshape it.

Structure

Sell a put spread and a call spread around the price: keep the credit if SPX stays in the middle, defined risk on both sides.

Center 5,950
Short width 30 pts
Wing width 20 pts
Net credit $4.50
P&L 05,9005,9205,9806,000SPX 5,950← SPX lowerSPX higher →

Breakeven

5,915.5 / 5,984.5

Max profit

+$450

Max loss

−$1,550

Defined risk

Reading it: anywhere between the short strikes (5920–5980) every option expires worthless and you keep the full $450 credit — the flat plateau. Past either short strike the position loses point-for-point until the long wing caps it: (20-point width − 4.50 credit) × 100 = $1,550 maximum loss on either side. The breakevens sit a credit's-width outside the short strikes (5920 − 4.50 and 5980 + 4.50). The app draws this same chart live from your actual positions — including partial closes and odd structures — and updates it as the clock moves.

Closing a position

To exit, submit the opposite actions to the ones that opened the position (sell to close a long, buy to close a short). You can close part of a position by using a smaller quantity. After the closing order fills, the position disappears from the list and its result lands in your realized P&L.

Liquidate: closing everything at once

When you want out of the whole book — not one leg, not one spread, everything — the positions view has a Liquidate button above the table. You pick how the closing orders should be placed and the platform builds and works them for you.

Smart

Captures the best available price

  • Groups your positions into favorable limit orders — up to four positions per order
  • Re-prices every working order every 5 seconds, one tick at a time toward the market
  • Never walks a price back, so it keeps closing in without giving up the spread
  • The default, and the right choice unless you need out this second
Aggressive

Only for emergencies

  • One market order per position — shorts bought back first, then the longs those closes release
  • Fills immediately, at whatever the market offers
  • On a wide 0DTE spread that can be materially worse than the mid
  • A leg with nothing quoted on the side it needs falls back to a one-tick limit, which may rest

Whichever method you choose, the closing orders are grouped so that no partial set of fills can leave you holding an uncovered short — that's why the aggressive method buys your shorts back before it sells the longs covering them. Your book is never more exposed mid-liquidation than it was when you started.

In practice the whole thing runs in one step: the closing orders are walked forward through the day's data from your current clock, so they can be dated after the moment you're parked at — advance the clock and watch them fill. On a live session it keeps working in the background until the book is flat, the day ends, or you press Cancel; the progress banner survives a page reload, because the work is happening on the server rather than in your browser tab. If a closing order never gets filled, the liquidation reports the positions it could not close and you can simply run it again.

Tips

Watch net delta, not each leg

A four-leg iron condor is four rows in the list but one number that matters: the net delta near zero that says you're balanced. When SPX drifts toward one short strike, net delta grows in that direction — a built-in early warning long before the P&L turns.

Use the payoff chart before you adjust

The chart already includes every open position, so sketching a "what if I add a put spread here" order from the chain and previewing it shows the combined shape — much harder to misjudge than mental arithmetic across legs.

In practice, scrub time across your position

Rewind to just after your entry and step forward through the day — watching unrealized P&L, delta, and the decaying time value move together is the fastest way to build intuition for how 0DTE positions actually breathe.