Options

This feature is in beta

The Options screen is open to every user. There is nothing to switch on and no extra charge for it.

It is still marked beta while we finish testing it, so expect it to change. Start with a small size on one account before you use it for real trading, and check your order book at your broker after you place a basket.

Where to find it

Open the menu and choose Trading → Options.

If you do not see the Options entry in the menu, sign out and sign back in so the menu is rebuilt.

Pick an underlying and an expiry

At the top of the screen there are two lists:

• Underlying — the index or stock whose option chain you want to see. The list is grouped, and a small tag shows which market the chosen one is listed on.
• Expiry — the expiry date of the contracts, with how far away it is shown beside it.

Changing either one affects the strategy you have built so far:

What you change	What happens to your basket
Expiry, on a structure built from a template	The structure is rebuilt on the new expiry.
Expiry, on a basket you built by hand	The basket is cleared, because those strikes belong to the expiry you left.
Underlying	The basket is always cleared.

Build a strategy

There are two ways to build one, and you can mix them.

Click B or S beside a strike

Beside every strike there is a B button and an S button.

• Press B to buy that contract, or S to sell it. One click either way.
• Press the other button to switch that leg round.
• Press the same button again to remove the leg.

Pick a ready-made template

The Basket panel above the chain offers complete structures in one click, grouped by the view they take on the market:

• Neutral — Straddle, Strangle, Iron Condor, Iron Fly.
• Bullish — Bull Call, Bull Put.
• Bearish — Bear Put, Bear Call.

After you pick one, small controls let you shape it. First choose how the strikes are picked, with Strikes by:

• Steps — a fixed distance from the money, counted in strike steps. It stays where you put it, whatever the market does.
• Delta — strikes are picked by delta instead, so they sit nearer in a calm market and further out in a volatile one.

Then set the distances. There are two, and which ones appear depends on the structure:

Control	In Steps mode	In Delta mode
Width	How far out of the money the main strikes sit, counted in strike steps.	Short Δ — the delta to aim for on the main strikes.
Wing	The extra distance out to the protective wings, again in strike steps. Four-leg structures only.	Wing Δ — the delta to aim for on those wings.

So Width is the distance from the money to the main strikes, not the gap between two legs, and Wing is measured outward from those main strikes rather than from the money.

The basket lists every leg with its side, strike, contract type, lots, price and value, and shows the net credit or net debit of the whole structure. There is also a button to invert the whole structure and one to clear it.

The panel is headed Basket, so you can see what it is even before you have added a leg to it. Once there are legs, the heading is followed by the name of the structure and how many legs it has.

Move a leg to another strike

Beside the strike on every leg row there is a − button and a + button. Each press moves that leg to the next strike on the chain.

You do not have to rebuild the leg. It keeps its side, its lots, and anything you set in the Target & SL columns. Before this, moving a leg meant removing it and clicking the chain again, which quietly lost all of that.

Plus always goes up the price scale, for a call and a put alike. So + is the next higher strike number, whatever the leg is. This is on purpose: a + that moved the number down on a put would disagree with the number printed between the two buttons.

When it will not move

The screen refuses and tells you why rather than moving the leg somewhere near what you asked for. Your basket is left exactly as it was:

• You are at the end of the chain. It names the strike and says it is the lowest or the highest one on this chain. There is nothing beyond it to move to.
• You already have a leg there. You cannot hold two legs of the same contract type on one strike. To trade a larger size on that strike, raise its lots instead.
• There is no contract at that strike. A chain can carry a strike on one side only.

A leg that quietly landed on a different strike from the one you asked for would be a different structure wearing your structure’s name, and you would not find out until it was placed. So it stops instead.

The live prices follow the leg

Only the strikes near the money carry live prices — that is what the Strikes buttons control. If you step a leg past that range, the screen widens the range for you so the leg keeps a price, and remembers the wider setting for next time, exactly as if you had pressed the wider Strikes button yourself.

It takes the smallest setting that reaches your leg, never the widest.

If your leg goes beyond even the widest setting you have, it still moves — but it has no live price out there, and the basket says so and will not place until it has one.

What it does to a saved basket

A leg you move by hand becomes a strike you chose. If you then save the basket, that leg is remembered from where it now is, not from where it started. A leg you had loaded on one exact strike does not get saved back onto a strike it has left.

More on moving a leg

Save a basket and use it again

If you trade the same structure often, save it once and load it whenever you want it.

Click Save on the basket. Give it a name you will know later, such as Weekly strangle, and click Save basket. To bring it back, click Saved baskets and then Load beside the one you want.

It remembers the shape, not the strikes

This is the part worth understanding, because it is what makes a saved basket still useful next week.

A saved basket does not store “sell this exact strike”. It stores “sell the call two strikes out of the money”. When you load it, the screen looks at where the underlying is today and rebuilds the structure around that.

So a strangle you saved last week comes back centred on this week’s price. If it stored the strikes instead, it would come back on strikes the market has already moved away from, and you would have to fix every leg by hand.

The save window shows you this before you save. Beside each leg it prints the rule it will be remembered as — At the money, 2 strikes OTM, 1 strike ITM — so you can see what you are storing. (What OTM and ITM mean.)

Keeping one exact strike

Sometimes you want a real price level, not a distance. There is a tick box on each leg in the save window: Keep this exact strike.

A leg saved that way always comes back on that exact strike, however far the market has moved.

It has a cost, so the screen tells you about it. A basket with an exact strike stays on the underlying it was built on. A strike number from one index means nothing on a different index, so the screen will not move that basket to another underlying. If you try, it refuses and names the leg that is holding it. Untick the box, save again, and the basket is free to move.

Baskets with an exact strike are marked in the list, so you can tell at a glance which ones can travel and which cannot.

If the name is already used

You cannot have two saved baskets with the same name, so the screen stops and asks what you meant:

• Use a different name — go back to the name box and pick another.
• Replace it — the old basket is replaced by the one on screen.

It is never decided for you. Replacing a saved strategy without being asked is the kind of loss nobody notices until the wrong thing is placed.

Changing one you already loaded

Load a basket, change it — slide a strike, add a leg, change the lots — and the button reads Save changes. That updates the basket you loaded instead of asking for a new name.

If you would rather keep both, clear the basket first, build it again and save it under a new name.

Deleting one

Click Delete beside a basket in the list, then click again to confirm. Two clicks, so a mis-aimed click on a list of similar names cannot remove one.

A deleted basket keeps its name. This surprises people, so it is worth saying plainly: if you delete Weekly strangle and later try to save a new basket with that name, the screen tells you the name is still in use. That is deliberate — the baskets you have already placed still need to read correctly under My baskets, so the old one is retired rather than erased.

To get the name back, save under it and choose Replace it. That also brings the old basket back into your list. (More on this.)

Saved baskets and placed baskets are different lists

Two similar words on one screen, so it is worth being clear:

• Saved baskets — the structures you have saved to reuse. Nothing has been placed.
• My baskets — the tab at the top of the screen, showing baskets you have actually placed, with their orders and profit or loss.

Saving a basket never places anything. Loading one never places anything either. Placing is always the Review & place step, and always your click.

Target and stop-loss on each leg

You can give each leg its own target, stop-loss and trailing step. This is optional. Most baskets use none of it.

Click Target & SL on the basket panel. Three extra columns open beside your legs: Target, SL and Trail. Fill in only the legs you want to protect, and leave the rest blank.

The button carries a count of how many legs are protected. That count stays on screen after you close the columns, so you can always tell that a basket carries protection before you place it.

Choosing the unit

Each column has one unit for the whole column. You set it in the column heading, not on every leg.

Unit	What it means
%	A percentage of the price that leg fills at.
pt	A distance in points from the price that leg fills at.
₹	An exact price level.

Trail offers only % and pt. A trailing step is a distance the stop-loss moves by, not a price it moves to, so an exact level would have no meaning there.

Who holds the stop-loss

Under the table, Stop-loss held by gives you two choices:

• AutoTrader — we watch the price and send the exit when your level is hit. This works on every broker, and it is the only choice that can trail.
• My broker — a real stop order rests at your broker. It cannot trail.

What the screen will not let you do

Some combinations cannot work, so the screen stops them and explains the problem next to the field you need to change:

• A target on its own. A target needs a stop-loss as well.
• A trailing step with no stop-loss. A trailing step moves the stop-loss, so there must be a stop-loss to move.
• A trailing step written as an exact price. Use % or pt.
• A trailing step on a stop-loss held at your broker. Either clear the trail, or let AutoTrader watch the stop-loss.

Review & place stays greyed out until every one of these is settled.

This works on intraday baskets only

Per-leg target and stop-loss are available on intraday baskets.

You choose intraday or carry-forward at Review & place, under Product type, so the check happens there rather than while you are building. If any leg carries a target or a stop-loss and the basket is set to carry forward, the screen will not place it. It names both ways out: choose MIS, or go back and clear the Target & SL columns.

The screen never changes your product type for you. Moving a basket to intraday on your behalf would change the margin it needs, and would hand the position to your broker’s end-of-day square-off. That is a large change to make simply because you typed a number in another column, so the screen stops and lets you decide.

The payoff table

Under the basket there is a table headed Payoff at expiry. It is always visible — you do not have to open anything to see it.

It answers one question: if the underlying finishes at this price on expiry day, what is this basket worth?

The three figures in the header

Along the top of the table are the three numbers most people want first:

Figure	What it means
Max profit	The most the structure can make at expiry.
Max loss	The most it can lose at expiry.
Breakeven	The underlying price at which it makes neither. Structures with legs on both sides have two, and both are shown.

The rows

Each row is one price of the underlying, with the profit or loss beside it. The rows are not picked at a fixed interval. Instead, the table always includes a row for:

• every strike in your basket,
• every breakeven, labelled Breakeven, and
• the current price, labelled Now.

Strikes and breakevens are the only prices where the result changes direction, so they are never left out. The current price is always there too, because it is where you are reading from. Other rows are filled in around them to give you the range in between.

What the figures include

• They are for one basket at the quantities shown above the table. An account trading at a multiplier of 3 would make or lose three times these figures.
• They are before brokerage and taxes. Your real result will be a little worse than the table shows, and your real breakeven a little further away.
• They are the value at expiry, not the value today. A structure can be showing a loss today and still reach the profit in this table at expiry, and the other way round.

When the table cannot show figures

If a leg has no live price, the table does not print rupee figures. It says it is waiting for a live price on every leg instead. This is deliberate: without the premiums, every number in the table would be a guess, and a table of guesses looks exactly like a table of facts.

If some legs have a price and others do not, the table says so and works with the legs that do.

What “Unlimited” means

Where a max profit or a max loss would normally be, you may see the word Unlimited.

This is a real answer, not a missing number. It means that side of the structure has no cap, so there is no figure to print.

You will see it when a structure can keep gaining or keep losing as the underlying keeps moving in one direction:

• a naked short leg — an option you have sold with nothing bought beyond it to stop the loss,
• a ratio spread — where the legs on one side are bigger than the legs on the other, so the larger side runs away past the last strike.

If you add a leg that caps that side, the word is replaced by a number. A four-leg structure such as an iron condor is capped on both sides, so both figures are numbers.

Unlimited on the max loss is worth reading carefully. It means the structure has no worst case: the loss is not capped by the structure itself.

The full payoff chart

The table gives exact numbers. The chart gives the shape.

Click Full payoff under the basket to open it, and Hide full payoff to close it again. Whether you leave it open is remembered for the next time you use the screen.

The chart always shows a wide enough range of prices to include both breakeven points, along with the profit or loss on either side of them. So you can see where your structure stops making money without having to change any setting.

The chart does not repeat the max profit, max loss and breakeven figures. The table above it already shows them.

The chart is the tallest thing on this screen, and on a phone it has no hover and no readable values. The table works everywhere, which is why the table is the one that is always on.

What placing at market will cost

Every leg of a basket is sent as a market order. That is deliberate — a limit order can rest unfilled and leave you holding half a structure — but it has a price. You buy at the price sellers are asking and you sell at the price buyers are bidding, and the gap between those two is the cost of going on immediately.

On a heavily traded contract that gap is a few rupees. On a contract almost nobody trades it can be far larger than the premium itself. So the screen tells you before you place, rather than letting you find out from your fill.

On the basket

In the Value column of a leg, a small tag appears when there is something worth telling you. It shows, in rupees, roughly what the gap will cost on that leg at the size it will actually send. On a desktop, hover it for the full sentence.

Most legs show nothing at all. A tag on every row would be a tag nobody reads, so the screen stays quiet on an ordinary, well-traded leg.

You may see one of four things:

Tag	What it means
wide (shown as a rupee figure)	The gap is a noticeable share of what this leg costs.
very wide (shown as a rupee figure)	The gap is a large share of what this leg costs. You will lose a real amount of money on the fill.
not traded	The contract is quoted, but nothing has ever traded on it, so those prices have never been tested and any figure would be a guess.
no quote	Only one side of the contract is quoted, so there is nothing to work the cost out from.

not traded and no quote show words rather than a number on purpose. A confident rupee figure beside them would look more reliable than the wide leg next to it, when it is in fact the one we know least about.

On the Review and place window

Above the account list, beside the net credit or net debit, a line reads Spread cost at market. It is the whole basket added up, and it is stated against the rupee credit or debit it comes out of, so you can see whether it is a lot.

If any leg is wide, untraded or half-quoted, a short line under it says which, and how many legs could not be worked out at all.

It warns, it never blocks

The screen will not stop you. A far out-of-the-money wing is legitimately wide, and refusing to place it would rule out structures that are perfectly reasonable to trade. The figure is there so the decision is yours and not a surprise.

It is an estimate, not a quote. It is worked out from the buy and sell prices showing at that moment, and the real fill depends on what is available when your order arrives.

More on each tag

What the chain shows

Two sets of buttons control the chain, and they do different jobs:

• Strikes chooses how many strikes either side of the money carry live prices. Strikes outside that range show a dash.
• Rows only changes how many rows are drawn on screen. It does not add prices.

So if your legs sit far away from the money, widen Strikes, not Rows.

You do not have to do this by hand when you use the − and + buttons on a leg. Stepping a leg past the priced range widens Strikes for you, to the smallest setting that reaches it. See Move a leg to another strike.

You can also switch the columns between Prices and Greeks.

The Greeks columns and their units

The Greeks view replaces the price columns with Delta, Gamma, Theta, Vega and IV. The same Greek is printed in different units by different tools, so the units used here are set out below. A number that looks wrong is very often just a different unit.

Column	What it measures	Unit used here
Delta	How much the option price moves when the underlying moves.	With respect to the forward.
Gamma	How much delta itself changes when the underlying moves.	Raw — per one point of the forward. It is not rescaled.
Theta	How much value the option loses as time passes.	Per calendar day.
Vega	How much the option price moves when implied volatility changes.	Per 1% of implied volatility.
IV	Implied volatility.	% annualised.

Gamma is raw, per one point of the forward. On a wide screen the column heading says so when you hover over it, but tooltips are not shown on a phone, so it is written here as well.

The Greeks are calculated values, not prices quoted by the exchange. Option terms explained covers what each one is for.

Review and place

When the structure is ready, click Review & place. A window opens showing every leg once more, and below it the list of accounts to place into.

Choosing accounts

• Every account starts ticked. Untick any you do not want.
• Use None to clear them all and then tick just a few — useful when you want to try the strategy on one or two accounts first.
• Use All to tick everything again.
• A line shows how many of your accounts are currently selected, and the Place button repeats it.
• Click a column heading to sort the list by account name, multiplier or available margin. It is sorted by name to start with.
• If you have saved any allocations, they appear as buttons above this list. Click one to tick exactly those accounts at their saved multipliers.

Allocations

An allocation answers two questions at once: which of your accounts trade, and how much each one trades.

You can save as many as you like and give each one a name. Click Qty. Allocations on the basket, next to the leg table.

If you have more than one account, All accounts is always offered on the place-order window. It trades every account at the same size, and it is the choice you start on. You only need to make an allocation when you want one account to trade more or less than the others.

Why more than one. Traders rarely trade the same way every day. A common setup is one allocation for ordinary days and a smaller one for expiry day, when margin is higher. Another is one allocation for the accounts that take your full strategy and another for the accounts that take only part of it. Save each one once, then pick it with a single click on the day.

Creating one:

1. Click Qty. Allocations, then Create an allocation.
2. Give it a name you will recognise later, such as Normal day, buys.
3. Tick the accounts it should trade, and type a multiplier for each one.
4. The running total at the bottom shows how many lots one leg will place across the whole allocation. Available margin is shown beside each account so you can size against what it can actually carry.
5. Click Save allocation.

Using one. On the Review & place step, your allocations appear as buttons above the account list. Click one and it ticks exactly those accounts and sets each one’s multiplier. Tick or untick an account by hand afterwards and the button stops being highlighted, because the selection is no longer that allocation.

If you have more than eight, the widest few are shown and the rest sit behind a +N more button.

Editing and deleting. Click Edit beside an allocation to change its name, its accounts or its multipliers. Delete asks you to confirm with a second click, so a mis-aimed click cannot remove one.

Size per account

Each account trades a multiple of the basket you built:

• The Multiplier column shows what that account is set to. An account at 3× places three times the size you built.
• The Lots column shows exactly how much that account will trade.
• To change one account for this order only, click Edit quantity and type a number. That one is not saved.
• To change what an account always trades, save it in an allocation. Those numbers are saved and are used every time you pick that allocation.
• An account you tick by hand, that is not in the allocation you picked, trades at 1×.

If an account works out to less than one whole lot, the screen tells you and asks you to raise its multiplier, set its size by hand, or untick it — rather than placing part of a structure into it.

If you already use account groups

The first time you open the Options screen, your existing sizes are copied into an allocation called My group sizes. Each account keeps the multiplier its group was set to, so nothing changes about how much you trade.

Two things are worth knowing after that:

• Changing a group in Settings no longer changes what this screen trades. Edit the allocation instead.
• An account that was in two groups of different sizes starts at 1×, because there was no single size to copy. Those accounts already showed 1× here before, so nothing has changed for them — but they are worth setting deliberately.

The reason for the change is that a group carries one multiplier for everybody in it, so sizing each account differently meant creating a group per account. An allocation holds a size against each account, so one allocation does the work of many groups.

Product type

Choose NRML to carry the position past today, or MIS for intraday, which your broker squares off before the close.

If any leg carries a target or a stop-loss, the basket has to be MIS. See Target and stop-loss on each leg.

Directly under that choice, the screen writes out what you have picked in plain words — that NRML carries the position forward past today, or that MIS is intraday and your broker squares it off before the close, and that all legs go at market. It is ordinary text on the screen, not a tooltip, so it is there on a phone as well as on a desktop.

All legs are sent as market orders. This is deliberate — a limit order can rest unfilled, which would leave you holding only part of a structure. The window shows what that is likely to cost you in spread: see What placing at market will cost.

The order the legs are sent in

Buy legs are always placed before sell legs, no matter what order you added them in.

This puts your protective long leg on before the short leg that increases your margin requirement, so a defined-risk structure is never briefly left as an unhedged short position. You do not need to be careful about the order you build in — the screen handles it.

Accounts are placed independently of each other, so a problem on one account does not stop the others.

After you place

The window then shows the outcome for each account, so you can see exactly what happened where. Keep this window open until you have read it — it is the only place that per-account result is shown.

The accounts are shown in two groups, and the ones that fell short come first.

• If anything did not go through, a red notice at the top says how many accounts were affected. Directly under it, each of those accounts is listed on its own, naming the exact leg that was refused — for example SELL PE 24000 failed — how many later orders in that account were never sent, and the message your broker sent back.
• Then a single green line lists every account that placed in full, with the order count, for example Placed in full — 8 accounts, 16 of 16 orders.

So you do not have to read through twenty rows to find the one that fell short, and you do not have to open your order book to work out which leg is missing.

The notice covers orders your broker refused while we were placing. An order your broker accepts and then rejects a few seconds later will not appear there, so the order-book check below still matters.

From there, Open Portfolio opens the Portfolio screen in a new tab, so you can watch the position while keeping the result in front of you. Check the Orders tab to confirm what actually reached your broker, and Positions to follow the structure once it is on.

Always check your order book. An order that is accepted by your broker can still be rejected by the exchange a moment later, for example for margin. The result shown here is what your broker accepted at that instant, so confirm on the Orders tab before you rely on it.

If something fails part way through

A basket can succeed everywhere, fail everywhere, or land somewhere in between. The result tells you which.

Outcome	What it means
Placed	Every leg went on in every account you chose.
Only partly placed	At least one account has some legs on and some not. You are holding an incomplete structure in that account.
Nothing was placed	No order reached a broker in any account. There is nothing open to undo.

How a partial result happens:

• Accounts are independent. Each chosen account runs its own legs. If one account is refused — most often for margin — that account stops there, and every other account carries on to completion. One account’s problem never takes the others down with it.
• Legs inside an account are in order, buys first. So an account that stops part way is more likely to be left holding the protective bought legs than a bare sold one.
• A leg has to go through in full. A very large leg is sent as more than one order, because there is a limit on how much can go in a single order. If any one of those orders is refused, that leg counts as not placed and the account stops there. This is deliberate: a bought leg that only half went through only half protects the sold leg that follows it, so the screen stops rather than sending a sold leg that is bigger than the protection you have.

Only partly placed is a warning, not a success. It means at least one account is holding part of a structure, which does not behave like the structure you built. The result window names the accounts that fell short and the leg that was refused in each, so you can see exactly where. Check that account’s order book at your broker, then either complete it or close what is open, by hand.

The screen does not cancel anything for you. If one leg of a pair was refused, the other leg stays live and the decision to keep it or close it is yours — whatever caused the rejection, usually not enough margin, would often defeat an automatic retry anyway.

Because each account runs on its own, accounts can also fill at slightly different prices, and a fast account may be a leg or two ahead of a slower one.

Commodity contracts

On commodity options — Gold, Silver and Crude Oil, including the mini contracts — the number you type is the exact quantity sent to your broker. It is not multiplied by a lot size, and the box says Qty instead of Lots to make that clear.

After the market closes

Once a market closes, the screen keeps showing the last traded price for every strike that traded while it was open, so you can still read the chain and compose a structure ready for the next session.

A strike we did not price during trading hours is different. We only learn a price when the strike trades, so if you widen Strikes or change the expiry after the close, those new strikes have never sent us a price and show a dash. This is not a fault, and nothing is missing — the line under the toolbar counts how many are waiting, and they fill in within seconds of the market opening.

Placing needs a live price on every leg, so the Place button waits until your legs are priced. Two separate things depend on prices:

• The figures. The net credit or debit, and every number in the payoff table, are worked out from the premiums of the legs. Without live premiums those figures would be guesses. This is why every leg needs a price before you can place.
• The strikes, but only when a template picked them. A template centres itself on the current price of the underlying. If there is no price to centre on, it spreads the structure across the middle of the strikes on screen instead, and says so. Those strikes are not at the money, so a structure built that way has to be rebuilt before it can be placed.

Strikes you picked yourself are never affected by this. If you built the structure by clicking the B and S buttons beside the strikes you wanted, those are exactly the strikes you chose. They do not depend on the price of the underlying at all, so you can place them as long as each leg has its own live price.

The screen tells you which one is holding it up: either how many of your legs have a live price and that every leg needs one, or that the strikes were centred without a live underlying price and the structure needs rebuilding.

For the underlying price itself, the screen uses the index or share price where there is one, and falls back to the nearest futures contract where there is not. A few underlyings do not publish a price of their own, and this is why they still work normally.

Building a structure before the open is deliberately allowed, because that is exactly when people plan one. Only the placing waits.

The notice at the foot of the screen

At the bottom of the Options screen there are three short lines. They are always there.

• The risk. This screen sends real orders to your live accounts, often to several accounts at once, and an order cannot be taken back once it is sent.
• The beta state, and the one thing to do about it: check your order book at your broker after every basket you place.
• An invitation to tell us what you think, with a Send feedback button beside it.

Send feedback opens WhatsApp with a message already started, addressed to the same support number you use for everything else. It goes to a person, not to the support assistant — feedback is not a question, and it should reach someone who can act on it. Nothing about your account is put into the message; you write it yourself and you can see it before you send it.

Your feedback decides what gets built next on this screen, so it is worth sending both when something works well and when it does not.

What this screen does not do

• It does not decide what to trade. You choose the strategy, the strikes and the size.
• It does not tell you whether a structure is a good idea, or suggest a strike, an expiry or a size. The templates are shapes you can pick from, not recommendations.
• It does not place anything on its own. Nothing is sent until you click Place.
• It does not work out your margin requirement. It shows the available margin your broker reports for each account, so you can see which accounts have room. What a structure will actually need is decided by your broker and the exchange.
• It does not close the structure for you. Use Positions to square off when you want to.

New to options? Option terms explained covers call and put, strike, expiry, lot size, premium, breakeven and the common multi-leg shapes in plain English.