New manual split and bulk merge

During the import process, Tradervue groups individual executions into trades. If you want to make changes to how these executions are grouped, we’ve had the ability to split and merge trades.

However, there have been limitations. Specifically:

  • Trades could only be split at points where you were flat (with the exception of option trades, which had a split options feature)
  • Only trades adjacent to each other in a timeline could be merged

To see where this could cause problems, imagine the following scenario. You have a single trading account, and you buy 100 shares of stock, as a longer-term position. Then a few days later, you buy and sell a new position in this same stock, as an intraday trade. So we have:

11/22/2016 – buy 100 SPY

12/14/2016 – buy 200 SPY

12/14/2016 – sell 200 SPY

Up to now, if these were done in the same trading account, there was no easy way to split out the intraday trade (the buys and sells on 12/14) into its own trade, because you weren’t flat immediately before or after the intraday trade.

Similarly, for merging trades, if you had three closed trades in SPY (each with their own executions), one each opened on the following dates:

7/19/2016

7/20/2016

7/21/2016

There wasn’t an easy way to merge together the trades on 7/19 and 7/21, without also merging the trade on 7/20.

Today, we are making two changes to give you the flexibility to split and merge trades how you wish.

Manually split trades

You can now select any executions you want from a trade, and as long as together they form a closed trade of their own, you can split them out into their own trade. So in our example above, you could split out the intraday buy and sell on 12/14 into their own trade.

To do this, go to the detail view for the trade, click Advanced:

Then click Manual split:

You can then choose the executions to split out into their own trade.

Merge trades from the bulk editor

You can now select multiple trades with the same symbol using the bulk editor, and merge them together:

This helps in two ways. First, if you have a number of trades you wish to merge together, you can now do this in a single operation, rather than having to merge them one at a time from the trade detail view. And second, you can now merge trades that are not consecutive in the timeline of trades in that symbol. In our example above:

7/19/2016

7/20/2016

7/21/2016

You could now merge the trades on 7/19 and 7/21 together, and leave the trade on 7/20 standing alone.

These new features are available today for all users!

Splitting option trades

Tradervue merges executions into logical trades as you import your executions, and provides the ability to split or merge trades to give you flexibility in how they are grouped together.

It is fairly strict, however, with respect to exactly where you can split a trade apart. Specifically, it must be split at a point in the trade timeline where the position is flat. Normally, this is clear, but in the case of long-running option trades, there may not be a point where the overall position is flat. Consider the following option trade:

cust-split1

In this trade, we have purchased a June 170/175 call vertical. Later, we rolled this to July. What we’d like to see is the June vertical split out into its own trade, and have the July vertical start a new trade. However, we bought the July vertical on June 13, and sold the June on June 14 (or we could have let it expire). There was never a point during this trade where we were flat – so it cannot be split using the regular split facility.

There is a now a way to address this. We click the Advanced button just above the execution list, and we will see a new “Split options” link:

cust-split2

UPDATE 2017-01-09: The “Split options” link is now called “Manual split”.

Click that, and we’ll see the new custom split page, where we see a list of all of our executions. We select the executions that should be split out into their own trade – in this case, the June vertical open and closing executions:

cust-split3

We then click “Split Trade”, and we will be left with two trades. One will contain the June vertical opening and closing executions, and will be closed. The other will contain the opening executions for the July vertical, and will be an open trade.

The custom split feature is available now!

Trade grouping, splitting, and merging

When you import your trades into Tradervue, they come in as a list of individual executions. Even something simple like buying 1000 shares might come in as buy 200, buy 400, and another buy 400. They might not even occur all at the same time – if you entered that order as a limit buy, there could be an arbitrary amount of time between the first and last execution. They also might execute on different venues.

But when you entered the order on your platform, you were thinking “buy 1000 shares”. All the rest is important, but in a higher level sense it’s all just details.

So when you import all of these trade executions into Tradervue, it uses an algorithm to group your trade executions together into logical trades. In highly simplified form, this algorithm basically starts a new trade if a) you change sides (e.g. long to short), or b) it’s been over a certain time limit since your last trade closed. Otherwise it may continue the prior trade.

What we’ve found is the vast majority of the time, Tradervue’s automatic trade grouping does what the trader would want, and the resultant logical trades match up with a “trade” in the trader’s mind. Occasionally, however, you might want to tweak this trade grouping.

So with that in mind, we have added two new functions in Tradervue:

Split trade

If you click “Advanced”, and then “Split Trade” on the trade detail screen, you’ll see the trade split interface. On this screen you can choose the specific execution that should start the new trade, then click “Split Trade”. Not all of your executions can be selected – only those that would ensure the original trade is closed after the split.

Here’s an example:

Merge trades

If you click “Advanced” and then “Merge Trades” on the trade detail screen, you’ll see the trade merge screen. Here you can choose which trade you would like to merge with the current trade; only trades which are eligible to merge are shown. If you select the trade you wish to merge, and click “Merge Trades”, the selected trade will be merged with the current trade.

For example:

For both split and merge, you will only see those options if they are applicable. For example, if a trade cannot be split, you will not see the Split Trade option. And if there are no eligible trades to merge with the current trade, you won’t see the Merge Trades option.

So all in all, you probably won’t need to use these features often, if at all. But if you want to be very specific in what you refer to as a “trade”, you can now fine-tune things as much as you like!