tastytrade Desktop Platform Tutorial & Live Trading

In this video, I'm going to teach you the basics of how the Tastytrade trading platform works. I'm going to walk through all of the primary pages for you and show you how I personally set up the platform for the easiest navigation and trade monitoring. Let's get started. This is the main platform interface that you're going to see once you log into your account. On the left hand side we have the watch lists. So here you can create different watch lists or you can go through the presets that Tastytrade has created. You want to create your own watch list? You can click on this gear symbol right up here and you can go to Watch lists. Click Lists. To create a new list, I need to first type in a name. So I'll type in tutorial and then I need to add a symbol to get that list started. So I could do AAPL for Apple, Hit Enter and hit Add Apple to Tutorial. I can go back to the Watchlist tab and I can click this dropdown, go down to tutorial. And now I have my new watch list. Now I can add symbols to this watch list much easier by using this add symbol box in the bottom left. So I could hit Spy. Hit Enter. Tesla, hit Enter. Nvidia, Hit enter. You get the idea. So you can create a watch list very easily here and then add different symbols to that watch list once it is created. If you want to customize these columns, you can also do that by once again going to the gear symbol and going to watch lists. And you can see on the left hand side here it says displayed columns and not displayed columns. Now you can quickly add or delete columns by simply clicking on these boxes. So for example, if I wanted to delete IV percentile, I could just click that, click IV Index and I could remove those columns. But if I want to add columns again, I can just simply click on any of these boxes on the right hand side for the not displayed columns. Now we can see that I have all these columns here, but there's multiple pages of columns because they can't all fit. So we can just go through these different pages using this arrow here. So you can customize these columns to keep track of metrics for all of the stocks in your watch list. Next I want to move over to the very top of the platform, which you'll see is currently populated with Spy. If I hover over the ticker symbol, I can search for a different ticker. So I'll just search for Tesla. And when you do that, it's going to populate the whole platform with that stock's specific information. So once I hit Tesla and hit Enter, now we can see that Tesla's trading for around $249 a share. Today it traded 115 million in volume. And if we go to the Trade tab, these options will all be displaying Tesla options. Another way to change what stock you're looking at is to simply click on the stock in your watch list. If you click on different products on your watch list, it is going to populate the whole platform. And with whatever stock you just clicked on, underneath this top information you'll see your account information. And here you will see a bunch of different columns. For instance, you'll see Net lic, which is your account value. If you were to close out all of your positions, you have P and L day, which is how much money you've made or lost on the current trading day. I've lost quite a bit of money today, unfortunately. But then the next column over is P and L Y T D, which is P and L year to date. So this is how much money you've made or lost within the current trading year. Next we have option bp, which stands for buying power. This is how much money you have available in your account to allocate to option or stock positions. Moving over, we have today's trades. Today's Trades is going to display how many trades you made on the current trading day. And then to the right of that we have the day trade counter. This is going to be particularly useful if you have a margin account with less than $25,000. Because if that's the case, you can't make more than three day trades in a rolling five day period. And you can change all of these columns up here by clicking on this gear symbol on the right hand side under config. If you click that and you go to Accounts and go to header detail, you will see all of these different columns that you can put at the very top of your platform for each of your portfolios. Now let's move to the Positions tab which is going to show all of the positions in your portfolio. So currently I have the Positions tab clicked and we can see I have two positions in this portfolio and we have the symbol that the position is in and then it gives you some relevant information about that particular stock. And then there's a bunch of other columns here which I really want to show you because when you first load up the Tastytrade platform, you are going to have much different columns and it could Be very confusing to monitor your trades and understand specific metrics about your position if you don't have the correct columns shown up. So for me, I'm using days to expiration. This shows me how much time left I have until my particular positions expire. I have the trade price, which is the entry price of the position. We have the mark, which is the current market value of the positions. Then we have P and L open, which is how much money you've made or lost since opening the trade. P and L day is how much money you've made or lost on the current trading day. Then we have net liq. Net LIC is net liquidation value, which means how much money your position is worth if you were to close everything out and turn it into cash. So it's essentially just the total value of your positions. If you were to liquidate them all, this is how much cash you would have. Next, I have days open. This is how much time I have since opening particular trades. And let me just drop down one of these positions for you. So if I click on any of these symbols, it will show the specific positions that you have in that position. So if I drop down the MSTR position, then we have more specific information for all of these different positions. So we have 520 days to expiration for some of these options and 65 days to expiration for some of the other options. Then we have the trade price, the mark, the P and L open, all these columns that I just described to you, then we have days open. So we can see that I've had one of the positions open for 194 days. And just nine days ago, I opened these two positions. To the right of that I have delta and theta. And these two things are telling me how much money I'm expected to make or lose and with a change in the stock price or the passage of time. So we can see individual delta levels for the specific options in my position. But if I close this down, we can see the overall position level, delta and theta. So these columns here are helpful to understand your position, sensitivity to the passage of time and changes in the stock price. So to change all these columns, you click on this gear icon in the top right, go to accounts positions, and then you can look at all of these displayed columns that I have here. You could copy these if you want to use my exact setup. But there's all these other columns too that you can also select from. If you want to add any of these, you just click it and it will add it to Your Positions tab. Next, I want to go to the Trade tab, which is right here in between Positions and Activity. If you click on the Trade tab, this is where you are going to be trading options from. So when I click on the Trade tab, this pulls up the options chain for whatever stock that I have selected. Currently, that's mstr. But if I go to my watch list on the left hand side, if I click on Tesla, this is going to populate the whole platform with Tesla information. And this changes all of the options to Tesla Options. So these are all the different expirations for Tesla options. We can see that there's a purple line here with either. And this is the earnings date that is coming up for Tesla. And so this just shows you exactly where the earnings date is in relation to these different expirations. So for instance, if I trade this August expiration, I know that this August expiration is going to be after earnings. And that's going to be important for me to know because maybe I want to wait until after earnings before entering a position in the August options. On the left we have the specific expiration date and in the middle we have the days until that expiration is reached. If I were to click on the September expiration, it's going to drop down all of the different options for Tesla in this September expiration. Now, there's a lot of strike prices here. Tesla's currently at 250, but I don't necessarily need to be looking at options with 100 strike price or even up to, you know, 550. So to close down a lot of these strike prices and to make it a lot easier to navigate, go up to the strike drop down in the top, right, and you can choose any of these numbers. I'm just going to choose 10. And if I do that, it's going to display 10 strike prices around $250, which is Tesla's current price. So this is how you can make it much easier to look at and make it much easier to navigate. But sometimes you're going to want to open up or close down some more strikes. So in the middle we have the strike price, on the left we have the calls, and on the right we have the puts. The two columns that will be static here will be bid and ask. The bid price is the highest price someone's willing to buy an option for. The ask price is the lowest price someone is willing to sell an option for. So if you want to buy an option, you're going to have to go to the asking price, which you can do by clicking on the ask price. But if you want to sell an option, you're going to have to go to those who are bidding for the option, and therefore you click on the bid price to set up an order to sell that option. To customize the columns, all you have to do is click on the column name and then change it to the metric that you want to put in that column. Now, I want to go ahead and actually execute some trades so you can see what it looks like to do various trades, such as buying stocks, selling stocks, shorting stocks, and then entering a number of different option positions. First, I want to show you how to simply buy shares of stock. So I'm going to buy and sell one share of Apple. To buy or sell shares of stock, all you have to do is go to the bid and the ask price at the very top of the platform. And if you want to buy shares of stock, simply click on the ask. This sets up an order to buy shares of stock. Now, when you buy shares of stock, it is going to set the number of shares to the default order quantity, which in this case is 100 shares. I don't want to buy 100 shares, so I'm going to change this to 1. With the order quantity set to 1, I can simply click review and send and send order. And now I have a working order. If I go to my positions tab, we will see that I have a working order to buy one share of stock for 224.29. I'm sorry, 224.24 is my limit order, but the shares are currently at 224.28, so they have to fall a few pennies for this order to get filled. And there we go. We see I just got filled on this order. And now in my positions, if I drop down Apple, it no longer says I have a working order. It says I have a real position. I have one share of Apple purchased for 224.24. Current price of the shares is 224.18. And we can see my P and L figures changing as the stock price changes in real time. If I want to sell this position, I can right click on it, hit close position. This sets up an order to sell the share of stock. I can hit review and send, send order. And now I have a working order to sell that share of stock. And we can see it says stc, which means sell to close. I have a limit order to sell the shares at 224.17. The current price of the stock is a little bit lower. So I need Apple stock to increase just a few pennies and this order will get filled. There we go. I did get filled in that order. I missed the notification. But if we go back to the activity tab, this will show us the activity in my account recently. So in the past 30 days we see I have a couple of different MSTR trades that were filled, but then we also see these Apple trades that I just entered. On the very right hand side we can see the description of the trade. The first one was buying a share as an opening trade designated by bto. And the second one was selling this stock as a STC order, which is sell to close. Initially I bought one share and then the negative one means I sold one share. And this position is completely closed out. To short a stock. Let me just change this to tlt. To short a stock, you click on the bid price. If I click on the bid price, this sets up an order to sell shares of tlt, which is the bond etf. I just chose this at random and I chose it primarily because it's a lower price stock. Again, the default order Quantity is at 100. I'm going to set this to negative one. And we can see this red box here that says short. This means I am going to be selling this stock as an opening trade and to close that I'll need to buy it back. So everything looks good. I can hit review and send send order and there we go. I just got filled instantly on a short stock trade. On the positions tab we can see that my share quantity says negative one. This means that I am short stock. Anytime you have a negative quantity in a position that means you are short that contract, you've sold it as an opening trade. If we go to mstr, we can see that on some of these options I have a negative quantity. And that's because these are short call options, meaning that I've sold them as an opening trade. And these were part of call spread positions. But if I want to close this out, I can right click it, hit close position. And on the bottom left we see it says cover with a green box. This means I'm setting up an order to cover the short stock position, which is another way of saying closing the short stock position. Everything looks good. I can hit review and send and send order. And if I go to my positions tab, I have that working order. It says btc, which is buy to close. And now I just have to wait to get filled on this order. When you're trading it is really good to keep an eye on the bid ask spread. For tlt, we can see that the bid price and the ask price have a difference of one penny. And this means when I'm trading actively like I'm doing now, by entering and exiting positions very close to each other, I'm not going to lose a lot of money from buying and selling at the ask price and the bid price I just got filled on that order. And if I go to the Activity tab we can see I initially sold the share of stock for 9304 and at the very right it says sell to open or STO with a negative one share and the closing order was buying it back for the same exact price as a BTC or buy to close order. If I go back to the Positions tab we can see that I no longer have a position in Apple or tlt. The shares are zeroed out and after today's trading day these are going to disappear from my account since I don't have an active position in them. Now. Let's go through Trading Options. I'm going to go to the Trade tab. I'm going to stay in Apple. I'm going to go to the July 26, 2024 expiration. And in these columns here we can see that these are very actively traded options because the open interest and the volume is very high in the thousands or tens of thousands for many of these strike prices, the volume is how many of those contracts have traded today. To buy and sell an option position, we're going to use the same exact thing that we did before. We're going to click on the ask price to buy an option and click on the bid price to sell it. If I don't have a position in the option, it is going to open it. So if I clicked on bid is going to open an order to short this option or sell it as an opening trade that would be betting against it. But I'm going to start by purchasing an option with Apple at 224.50. I'm going to click on the ask price of the 225at the money call option. And the mid price is at 310 which is the halfway point between the bid and ask. But it's going to change in real time. So long as this lock is not locked. We can see the buying power effect says a $310 debit, which means it's going to lock up $310 of my option buying power. To purchase this option, I'm going to hit review and send and send order and I got filled right away. If we go back to my positions tab and reopen Apple we can see I have one contract of the 7-26-7 day 225 strike call option. I traded it for $3.15 and this is a red negative 3.15 indicating that I paid $3.15 to enter the trade. The current market value is 3.17. So I'm up 2 bucks on this trade to close it. I can do right click and close position but I want to show you a bracket order. A bracket order is going to set up a stop loss and profit target on the same exact option. Which means if one of these orders is triggered, the other one will get canceled. So if I got filled at the profit target then the stop loss will get canceled and if I got hit on the stop loss then the profit target will get canceled. The current market price of the option is 310. So I'm going to set the profit target at 320 and I'm going to set the stop loss at 305. I'm going to set the stop trigger at 3:05 and I'm going to change this to limit order and I'm going to set the stop limit to 295. What this means is that if the options price drops to 305 it is going to trigger this stop loss order with a limit of selling this option for no less than $2.95. This is safer than using a market order because if I used a market order, I don't know what price I'll get filled at. And so it is possible that even if the option is priced at $3.05, I might get filled at $1.50 or something like that. But I'm going to go ahead and hit review and send send order and we can see. I have two different orders now. I have a profit target which is this one trying to sell the option for 320. And I have a stop loss with a trigger of 305 but the limit is at 295. But you can't actually see that limit order right here. When one of these orders gets hit, the other one will get canceled with the option price at 317. The closest thing to getting this filled is going to be the profit target of 320. For that to happen, we're going to need to see Apple increase just a little bit and I could potentially get filled on this profit target order. Let's sit it out and see what happens. There we go. I just got filled on the profit target and we can see that the stop loss got canceled automatically. And when my positions tab, I have no position. So that's a super powerful way to manage your option positions completely passively. That whole process of buying a call and selling it could be done with a put option as well. But now I want to do a complex order such as buying a spread. For this I'm going to go to Nvidia. I'm going to open up the trade tab. I'm going to open up the July 26th options and we can see that there's a lot of open interest and a lot of volume. So these are actively traded or liquid options. For this one, I'm going to buy a put spread. Since we just did calls, let's do a put spread. This means I'm going to buy and sell a put option at different strike prices in the same order. For this I'm going to buy the 119 put and I'm going to sell the 2 or the 116 put and this will create a put spread position. The current price of that spread is at 134. Here we can see the max profit potential and the max loss potential. Everything looks good. So I'm going to hit review and send and send order and there we go. I just got filled on that spread immediately here. While I'm on the trade tab, we can see these boxes around the positions that I have. So we see a box around the ask price of the 119 put with a one next to it. This indicates that I own one of these 119 puts. And next to the 116 put it says negative one with a box around the bid price. And this is a visual representation of my put spread that I just purchased in Nvidia. If we go to the positions tab and drop down Nvidia, we can see that I do have these two options. One of them is in the money. The 119 put is in the money. Since Nvidia stock price is below 119. So anytime you have an option that is in the money, you will see this ITM designator on your position. To close this spread, I can click both of these legs, right click, hit close position and the spread has fallen to 131 or 133. It's going to change in real time. Let's see if I can get filled at 135. Well, the spread price is jumping around quite a bit. So I'm going to lock it in at 135, which I did by clicking this arrow change it to 135. You could also type it in. When you enter a custom price, it is going to lock the order price again. If you unclick that lock, it is going to let the price float around to the mid price and that's going to change in real time. Let's see if I can get filled at 135. I'm going to hit review and send and send order. Go back to my Positions tab. And now we see I have a working order and it says vertical. That's because this is a vertical put spread. We see I have a limit order to sell it for 135. The mid price is at 133. 134. Again it's jumping around in real time. As Nvidia's stock price changes, the mid price is teetering a little bit higher. As this mid price increases to 136 or 137, it gets more likely that I'll get filled on this. In general, getting filled on multi leg orders such as a vertical spread or an iron condor is going to be a little bit trickier than an individual option. But if you're trading liquid options, you will be able to get filled on that spread fairly easily. And in my case I might just have to decrease this order by one penny. Since I want to get filled on this order. I'm going to hit Replace order, drop the price to 134. Hit review and send send the order. I'll go back to my Positions tab. And now we can see I have a new working order trying to sell the spread for 134. I'm not getting filled at 134. If you really wanted to exit a position, you could do this process where I just decreased the price a little bit and I could once again right click hit Replace order. I could drop it to 133. Hit review and send and send order. And there we go. I just got filled at 133. In the positions tab we can see the options are zeroed out and the position is closed. If you're interested in opening a Tastytrade account, be sure to check their funding bonuses linked below as they may be different from what are shown on the screen right now. I want to disclose that that is an affiliate link and I do receive compensation if you decide to use the link and fund an account, but it's at no cost to you. So if you decide to go that route, using the link below is a great way to show your support for the channel and the work that I do here. Let's get back to the platform and finish up the tutorial. The next tab that I want to show you is the History tab, which is essentially the Activity tab, but it is more detailed. Here we can see all of the trades that I've just made today. For instance, we could see I bought the Apple share and sold it moments later for just a little bit of a loss. But the cool thing about this is you can actually click on various positions and it will sum up how much money you made or lost and will also tell you your fees on those trades. For instance, if I click on the Apple purchase and Apple sale, we can see I lost 7 cents on that trade. And then if we go ahead and add in the TLT short stock position and repurchase again my loss on those four trades is a negative 7 cents since I didn't lose any money on the TLT. The next thing though is you can go to year to date and this is really helpful because this will break down your realized profits and unrealized profits for the year. Here we can see my realized gain on the year is $17,574 and the unrealized gain is $246,370. And you can also sort by realize and unrealized gains and this will tell you what products are your most successful and your biggest losers are. And this is really helpful for tax purposes since you only pay taxes on realized gains every single year. So even though I'm up a lot of money this year, I've only realized $17,000 in gains and this is the amount that I'm going to pay taxes on. You can also see all your commissions and fees and your P and L year to date with the fees included. Next up is the Chart tab which you can access by clicking on this chart symbol right here. If you click on that it will open up the Chart tab. Currently I have a one hour chart up with a one year time frame, although the one year time frame is actually not being shown since this is such a small time frame. You can change this by clicking on the time frame and going to one day to show a daily chart. I currently just have some simple moving averages shown which you can add to your chart by clicking on this Indicators box. Click on Indicators. You can choose from all these different indicators. I've just chosen simple moving averages or SMA and once you add that to your chart, you can click on the style and you can change the width and the color and a bunch of different parameters to customize the look and feel of your indicators. To change your look and feel of the chart, you can click click on this gear icon. Go to Themes. Currently I have the dark theme. I could click on the light theme, but I really do not like how that looks. You can also customize it by hitting custom and then changing all of your colors here. If you go to the chart tab, you can choose to hide all of your drawings or hide all of your indicators. So if I click Hide all Indicators, this removes the moving averages without actually deleting them from the charts. Under the layout, you can add some more things. One thing I like is I used, I like to use some right margin. So if I added 50 right margin, this will add essentially 50 periods to the right of the chart so that the candlesticks are not right up to the right side of the chart. If I change this to zero, you'll see the price goes way to the right of the chart, which I don't like. I'd like to have a lot of right margin, such as, you know, 50 to 100 periods. If you want to add some simple lines to your chart, you can click on this tool, drop down and you can drop down a price level, put it on your chart. You could do a time level, put it on your chart and this could be useful. If you had an option position, say in September, you could put a vertical line at your options expiration so that you can visually see what you need the stock price to do by the time of your expiration and how much time you have left. If you're new to options trading and some of the terminology or concepts that I discussed in this video were not clear to you, I would recommend checking out my three hour crash course called Options Trading for Beginners that I recorded in 2020. I will leave that video for you right here. My name is Chris and I will see you all very soon in a new video.