Log and manage positions

A position is the record Tradr keeps for one symbol in one direction, from the first share you buy to the last one you sell. Everything else in the app — your equity curve, the performance charts, the tax summaries — is derived from positions and the fills inside them.

This page walks the whole lifecycle with one worked example, and states what the app does at each step.

Before you start

A position belongs to an account, so create one first. New Position stays disabled until you have at least one, and its tooltip reads Create an account first.

Before you create your first account, the dashboard shows a Welcome to Tradr setup screen instead of the widget grid. Create my first account on that screen opens the same form as Accounts → New Account.

The form has six fields: Name, Currency, Trading-day timezone, Starting balance, Default risk %, and Brokerage. Only the name and currency are needed to log a position. Getting started describes each field.

Two of them matter on this page.

Trading-day timezone defines the trading day for this account. That is what decides whether a closed position can be reopened. It is not your reporting timezone, which is a separate per-user setting under Settings → Profile. That one decides how your P&L is bucketed by day, week and month. Setting either one never sets the other.

Default risk % is the share of the account balance you risk on one trade. It prefills the trade calculator and changes nothing about a position you log here. Choose No rule to set none.

To look around before you create anything, choose Add sample data on the setup screen. Tradr creates one sample account with positions already in it, and a banner marks every figure on screen as sample data. Choose Remove sample data in that banner when you are ready to enter your own.

The three states

A position is always in exactly one of three states, shown as a badge on the row and on the detail page.

State	Meaning	What you can do
draft	Planned, not in the market. No fills, no effect on your balance.	Edit anything, add an entry fill, open, delete
open	In the market. At least one entry fill, not fully exited.	Add fills, edit the plan and notes, delete
closed	Fully exited. Entry and exit quantities match.	Edit the plan and notes, reopen, delete

A draft costs nothing and commits nothing. Use it to write a trade down before you take it.

Step 1 — Create the position

Go to Positions → New Position and fill in:

Symbol — for example AAPL. Options use the OCC contract format, such as NVDA260321C120.
Side — Long or Short.
Asset Type — Stock or Option.
Account — which account the trade belongs to.
Notes — optional, and worth writing now. This is the field you will thank yourself for later.

Select Create.

Expected result: the position appears in the list with the status draft, and every price column reads —. Nothing has been bought yet.

Step 2 — Open it with the first entry fill

A draft has no fills. Opening one therefore asks for the fill that puts you in the market — the app does not let a position go open with nothing in it.

Select Open position on the row. Enter:

Price — the fill price.
Quantity — how many shares or contracts.
Fees — commission and charges for this fill. Leave 0 if you have none.
Date & Time — defaults to now. Change it when journalling an older trade.
Notes — optional, per fill.

Select Add.

Expected result: the status changes to open, # Open shows your quantity, and Avg Entry on the detail page shows your fill price.

In the worked example: 100 shares of AAPL at 190.00, fees 1.00.

Step 3 — Record the trade plan

Open the position and select Edit. On an open or closed position the only editable fields are Target Price, Stop Loss, and Notes.

That restriction is deliberate. Once a position has fills, its symbol, side, asset type, and account are history — changing them would rewrite a trade that already happened. The plan fields are annotations, so they stay editable.

Set a target of 210.00 and a stop of 185.00.

Expected result: Target R/R appears on the detail page.

How the two ratios are calculated

Metric	Meaning
Target R/R	Planned reward per unit of risk: distance to your target divided by distance to your stop.
Actual R/R	What you actually got, in the same units. Signed, so a loss shows negative.

Both measure from your average entry, not your first fill. This has a consequence worth knowing: scaling in moves your average entry, so it moves your Target R/R too. In the worked example the ratio starts at 4.00 against a 190.00 entry, and drops to 2.75 once a second fill lifts the average to 191.6667. The target and stop did not move — the entry did.

Neither ratio is shown when the stop equals the average entry, because the risk per unit would be zero.

Step 4 — Scale in

Select Add Fill, keep the type as Entry, and enter the second fill.

The example adds 50 shares at 195.00, fees 1.00.

Expected result: Avg Entry becomes 191.6667 — the quantity-weighted average of 100 at 190.00 and 50 at 195.00. # Open becomes 150.

Step 5 — Take a partial exit

Select Add Fill and change the type to Exit.

The example exits 60 shares at 200.00, fees 1.00.

Expected result: the position stays open with 90 units left, and the P&L figures fill in immediately.

Realized P&L does not wait for the close. The moment an exit fill lands, the profit on that portion is realized, posted to your account balance, and counted in your performance figures. After this fill the example shows a gross P&L of $500.00 on a position that is still open.

Fees follow the same rule. Each exit carries its own fee plus a proportional share of the entry fees for the quantity being closed. Exiting 60 of 150 units takes 60/150 of the 2.00 in entry fees, so 0.80, plus the 1.00 exit fee — a net P&L of $498.20 against a gross of $500.00.

You cannot exit more than you entered. A quantity above the open amount is rejected.

Step 6 — Close it

Exit the rest, and the position closes itself.

The example exits the remaining 90 shares at 205.00, fees 1.00.

Expected result: the status changes to closed without any further action. The final figures for the example:

Metric	Value
Avg Entry	191.6667
Avg Exit	203.0000
Gross P&L	+$1,700.00
Net P&L	+$1,696.00
Actual R/R	+1.70
Return %	+5.9%

There is no separate “close” step to remember. The Close Position button stays disabled while any quantity is still open, and by the time it would be enabled the balancing exit has already closed the position. The button exists for the cases the automatic path does not cover.

Closing stamps the close time from the fill’s timestamp, not the moment you pressed the button. A trade you journal a week late is recorded on the day it actually closed, which is what keeps the performance and tax summaries honest.

Reopen a position

Select Reopen on a closed position. It returns to open so you can add more fills.

Two rules apply:

Same trading day only. A position can be reopened only on the day it was opened, measured in the account’s trading-day timezone. This is for re-entering a trade you scratched, not for reviving last month’s. Your reporting timezone has no say here.
Add a fill before closing again. A reopened position starts with nothing open, so a straight re-close would be a no-op. Tradr rejects it and says so.

Reopening reverses the realized P&L that the close posted. Closing again posts it afresh from the fills as they then stand.

Edit or remove a fill

Each row in the Fills table has a ⋯ menu for editing or deleting that fill.

Use it to fix a typo in a price, a quantity, or a fee. Every derived figure — averages, P&L, both ratios, your account balance — recalculates from the fills, so correcting a fill corrects everything downstream. Nothing is cached that could disagree with it.

You cannot add fills to a closed position. Reopen it first, or delete it and re-enter it.

Delete a position

Delete is available in every state.

A draft disappears. It never touched your balance.
An open or closed position is removed, and any realized P&L it posted is reversed out of your account balance.

Deletion is permanent — there is no undo, and the fills go with it. To take a position out of your statistics without losing the record, there is no archive today; the honest options are to keep it or to delete it.

What the columns mean

The Positions list shows, per position:

Column	Meaning
Entry Price / Exit Price	Quantity-weighted averages across the fills
Target Price	Your planned exit, if you set one
Target R/R · Actual R/R	Planned and realized reward per unit of risk
# Open · # Closed	Units still open, and units exited
P&L	Realized net P&L, including exits on positions that are still open

The tabs above the table — All, Draft, Open, Closed — filter by state.

Full definitions of every figure are in the metrics glossary.

Next steps

Import your history — bring existing trades in from a CSV rather than typing them.
Review performance & P&L — what the numbers add up to across positions.
Accounts & the multi-currency ledger — how a position’s P&L reaches your balance.