What tracking 200 options trades in a spreadsheet taught us about our own bad habits

A year into running an options account together, our P&L was roughly flat and none of us could say why. So we started keeping a spreadsheet.

Six months and 200 trades later, the data told a story none of us would have told out loud.

The problem with trading from memory

Traders keep mental scoreboards. We remembered the big wins — the 0DTE SPX call that tripled, the iron condor that expired worthless and kept the full premium. The losses blurred into background noise.

We'd trade like that for months at a time. Account balance roughly flat, maybe slightly down, and we couldn't say why. One catastrophic loss? A hundred small mistakes? Bad sizing? Wrong strategy for the regime? We didn't know.

So we built a spreadsheet.

What the data showed

The first thing we tracked was straightforward: open date, close date, ticker, strategy, strikes, contracts, premium collected, premium paid to close, and the resulting P&L. Nothing exotic.

After 200 trades logged over several months, the patterns were hard to miss.

Win rate was fine. Sizing was the problem. We were winning roughly 68% of trades — right around where you'd expect for credit spreads. The 32% that lost hurt more than they should have because sizing was inconsistent. Some weeks we'd risk 1% of account per position. Other weeks, when conviction felt high, someone would bump to 4–5%. Our worst single-month drawdown came from two trades sized 3x what the sizer called for. The math doesn't forgive that.

We were overtrading Mondays. Looking at the day-of-week breakdown, we opened significantly more positions on Monday than any other day — and Monday was our worst win rate. One of us said it out loud: we were using Mondays to deal with weekend restlessness. That's not a strategy. That's a habit.

Why a spreadsheet beats your broker's reports

Most brokers give you transaction history, and it's fine for tax reporting. But it doesn't answer the questions that improve trading.

What's our win rate per strategy? How does P&L change with days held? Are we sizing consistently, or is feel driving contract count? Which setups have negative expected value over a meaningful sample?

A broker export gives you raw transactions. A journal gives you analysis.

The setup that worked

After trying notebooks, Notion databases, and a custom app, we settled on a spreadsheet. Formulas where we needed them, free-form columns where we didn't.

The sheet has a trade log with row-per-position, a dashboard that rolls up the metrics we check, a strategy-breakdown tab (where we eventually noticed our bull put spreads on large-cap ETFs were outperforming our butterflies), a position sizer, and weekly and monthly review sheets. We do the rollup on Sunday nights with coffee that's gone cold by the time we're on the strategy tab. Nothing about this is glamorous.

The uncomfortable part

Tracking forces honesty. When a row in the log shows a $400 loss on a position the sizer said should be one contract and we did three, there's no narrative to hide behind. The data is right there.

We've had months where win rate was above 70% and we still lost money, because the losers were bigger than the winners. That's not bad luck. That's a behavioral pattern, and you can only fix it if you can see it.

What changed after six months of logging

We stopped opening new positions before Tuesday unless there was an actual catalyst. Overall win rate went up 4 percentage points the month after.

We got religious about position sizing. Every trade now goes through the sizer; max risk per position is 2% of account value. Drawdowns got shallower the same month we set that rule.

We cut the setups where the data showed negative EV. Selling naked puts into a VIX spike is the trade where the small wins compound slowly and the one loss eats the whole year. Removing that and short strangles in trending markets smoothed our monthly P&L more than any other change.

If you want the template

I cleaned up what we built — the trade log, dashboard, strategy breakdown, position sizer, weekly and monthly reviews — and put it on Gumroad as the Options Trading Journal. $9.

No course, no Discord, no upsell. The spreadsheet we use.