I have some big news!! Today, we are officially announcing the launch of Options Cafe. You can now use our platform to make options trades via Tradier. No other trading platform allows you to discover, trade, and review your trades like Options Cafe. We have built Options Cafe from the ground up with one thing in mind — making multi-leg options trading a snap. I think we have built the options platform you have been yearning for.
Before I wow you with all the amazing features Options Cafe offers, I thought I would lead with some very exciting news. As part of our launch, we have partnered with Tradier to provide brokerage services. With this partnership, we are able to provide commission-free stock and options trades included in your subscription to Options Cafe. For $60 a month or $600 a year, you can trade as much as you want and never pay a dime in commissions. Our service pays for itself in just a few trades. This deal works for both incoming and current Options Cafe customers.
An options trader with a small $20,000 account might trade 20 iron condor trades a month. So that would be 10 open trades and 10 closing trades for a total of 20 trades. At your current broker, you most likely are paying over $700 a month or $8,000 a year, just in commissions. With Options Cafe, you would only pay $60 / month or $600 / year.
Our partnership with Tradier is for new and current Tradier customers. Once you have created your Options Cafe account and linked your Tradier account, please contact us via help@options.cafe and we will setup your new pricing.
Discovering Trades With Options Cafe
One of the best features of our platform is discovering your multi-leg trades with only a few clicks. Our easy trade screener allows you to select different configurations, and moments later, Options Cafe will show you all your possible trades. You can save your screener confirmations and come back anytime for an updated trade list.
Once I am happy with my screener, I can save it and possible trades will update in real-time. Every time I visit Options Cafe my saved screens are already updated with possible new trades. Why spend hours every day discovering trades? Review your trades and get on with life! The days of sitting in front of the computer for hours at a time are over.
Managing Open Trades
Trying to manage your multi-leg options trades with traditional stockbroker interfaces is one of the worst experiences. Most of them simply list every option in your portfolio with no grouping for your trade strategy. Many options traders keep spreadsheets just to keep track of their positions. With Option Cafe’s trading dashboard, we group all your trades for you. You can very quickly see the status of your trades. Never again will you have to keep track of which options goes with which strategy.
In the screenshot above, you will notice our platform grouped the trade while classifying it as a put credit spread. With a put credit spread, we want to monitor decay of the trade — you will notice the green progress bar gives you a quick view of how far along your trade is to your optimal exit point.
Analyzing Your Performance
As an active options trader, you might make hundreds, or even thousands, of trades each year. With general purpose and jack of all trades brokers, it is very hard to get data about how you are performing beyond simple profit and loss. Our next generation reporting will allow you to zoom in on your trades to discover what strategies are working and what strategies are not. The more we learn from our trades, the better (and more profitable) we will be.
Options Cafe Is In Beta
We are not one of those companies intending to state we are in beta for months or years at a time — but we want to give some warning that for the next few months, we consider Options Cafe in beta. We have no intention of hiding behind this “beta” label for long. Should you have any issues with our platform, please contact us ASAP at help@options.cafe and we will drop everything to resolve your issue.
Also, we do not support every options strategy known to man just yet. We are adding support for new strategies every week. If you sign up for Options Cafe and you do not see your favorite strategy simply email us at help@options.cafe and we will prioritize your strategy.
Backtesting Coming
One of the features we are most excited about is backtesting your options strategies. We have some early prototypes of point and click backtesting. Configure a few parameters and within seconds you can see how your favorite strategy would have performed in the past. In many cases, Options Cafe can backtest over 12 years of options trading.
Backtesting is not ready for primetime, and we are focusing on getting our current offering out of beta, but it is coming soon. We are targeting a launch of backtesting by mid-2019. Our pricing will likely change when we launch backtesting. As a thank you to our early adopters, we plan to give special pricing to any current customer at the time of our backtesting release.
Please Send Feedback
The launch of Options Cafe has been something we have been working on for years now. We originally created Options Cafe for our own internal use but realized it was too good not to share with the world. We have been using our platform to make our own trades for years now. With that said, we have existed on our own internal feedback. If we want to make Options Cafe increasingly better, we need your help. Please, at any time send us your thoughts or issues to help@options.cafe. We promise to move quickly on any issues you might have and will consider deeply any suggestions.
Lastly, if you are new to options trading and just want to get some help, please email me at ask@options.cafe. I am more than happy to give you any advice I can provide. You can follow along with my SPY, put credit spread trading strategy via #SpicersTrades, or my monthly summaries on this blog.
I hope you love Options Cafe as much as we do.
Happy Trading!
~Spicer
Related Topics: put credit spread, commissions, brokers, reporting
