My Blueprint or Roadmap (Keeping Score on a Scoreboard)

Managing Options Trades and Keeping Score

Every sport seems to have a way of keeping score. The same is true in the investing world. Most people just ignore the scores, and hope all is well. I take a more disciplined approach.

One of the reasons I can spend so little time trading options is that I have created my own blueprint or roadmap for what I do before I enter an options contract, how I track the contract, and how I monitor my results – I keep score. Excel and Word are the two tools that I use. In this post I plan to describe the pieces of my blueprint and scorekeeping process.

In the past this was more complicated, and I simplified my process and record keeping minimizing my time and effort. I use copy/paste extensively in both Word and Excel. A template makes this so less time-consuming. I also download the activity from Fidelity’s website and just format a few fields to help me see the details and the total income from my work.

The Order Verification Process

I want to make certain that I always check certain values before I enter an option trade. This includes covered call options and cash covered put options. The following illustrates my actual Word document. Each options trade has the same key data points. These include important dates and the main pieces of each contract I buy or sell.

For each transaction (covered call and puts) I always verify the next earnings date and Ex-Dividend date. I also want to know the probability of my option being assigned. For a covered call, that means I will have to sell my shares at the contract price. For a cash covered put, as shown in the NVDA example, I will have to buy 100 shares of NVDA at $135 per share if the price drops to or below that price on January 31, 2025.

You can see from this record that I have rolled my original option contract and did some subsequent rolls as well. Each roll earned me additional income. Using Fidelity Active Trader Pro, I can quickly look at the options expiring on the coming Friday (or future dates) and determine if I want to do a roll or just let the option expire or be assigned to me.

Monitoring Results

I don’t want to spend much time trading options. It is better than a part-time job because I can enter the trades quickly and then go on to other tasks. At the end of the day I can download (if there were trades) the activity from Fidelity’s website. I make some minor modifications to one of the columns (Column F) so that I can filter, sort, and sum the data by type of transaction. Each year I put a suffix on the code I use. So, for example, each covered call contract that I sell is coded as CC-25. If I roll a covered call contract there will be a pair of transactions: CC-25 and BCC-25.

My Transaction Codes Explained

This image shows each of the codes I am using for 2025. It is one of the ways I can keep score without consuming a lot of time.

2025 Income YTD

YTD options income is $2,407.70. There have been six trading days thus far in 2025. There was one fewer days in the first full week due to the funeral for President Jimmy Carter. Therefore, my average daily options trading income is just over $400. That isn’t bad for a few minutes of work each day.