Account settings
This is a fairly straightforward post about how to navigate through the account settings. We'll skip the usual email/password ect., settings, and focus mostly on the settings that affect the functionality of TradesViz features.
To view the settings page, click on the menu icon on the top right corner of your dashboard and then click on the "Account Settings" option in the dropdown or, if you are logged into your TradesViz account, you can click here.
We'll be exploring a few tabs that have settings that affect the working of TradesViz features.
Account Sharing
This feature is already explored in detail in the blog post here.
Global Account Settings
There are currently 6 settings on this page most of which affect some parts of the TradesViz system.
Display name
When sharing trades or trading days online, your display name will be visible. By default, your display name is your username - you can change your display name anytime you want. Also, when adding users to give them access to your accounts via the Account sharing menu, you need to use the user's display name.
Base timezone
All the date and time information (open date, close date, etc.,) will be shown in this timezone. Any time you edit or add an execution/trade, the date you enter will be also assumed to be in this base timezone. Therefore, this also affects how the executions/trades are grouped for charts, tables (group by day), and how it's displayed in all your shared (public) trades and trading days.
Base currency
TradesViz supports and handles trades from various currencies even in the same trading account. Meaning, you can import trades that were made in INR, USD, JPY and you would see those trade's executions in their respective currencies. However, fields related to PnL is converted from the native currency of the trade/execution to the base currency. For example, the image below shows a trade made in the Indian stock market so the native (or quote) currency of the trade is in INR, but since the base currency in the TradesViz is set to be in USD, the PnL field is in USD.
To do this conversion (to USD in this example), forex rates on the dates of the executions are used to calculate each execution's base execution price - using this base execution price, base PnL is calculated. Since the base currency is set to be USD, the base currency calculation will be in USD and thus all non-USD trades will go through this same conversion process.
Converting currencies frequently does not result in loss of precision of any price-related data because all conversions start with the original native price of the execution. Meaning, even after you convert all your trades from USD to say, EUR, the USD executions prices are still kept for future conversion prices since we are not using the converted currency as the base for the next conversion, there is pretty much no build-up of conversion inaccuracies or loss of precision. However, all of this only applies to prices and PnL.
When converting currencies, there is an additional decision that the user has to make - how commissions are handled. By default, all commissions are assumed to be in the base currency only. When you convert from currency A -> currency B, you can decide if you want to only convert the currency sign i.e change 0.99 USD to 0.99 EUR or convert the currency i.e, 0.99 USD to 0.91 EUR (using a conversion rate at the time of writing this post). Unlike the way PnL and prices are converted, repeatedly converting base currencies has an effect on the commission's price precision since we're using the converted value for every new conversion process. There is no concept of "native" commission like we have for the price. To reiterate, commissions are always treated to be in the base currency.
A situation arises here - how to handle multi-currency commissions when I'm importing trades that have a commission that is NOT in my base currency? Using the INR trade example from above, what if my base currency is in USD, but my imported transactions list commission in INR? That's easy to solve. When importing such a file, in the import page, open the advanced setting and check the option that says "Convert commission's currency if account's base currency is different from broker default currency"
If you check this option, the resulting imported trade will be exactly like in the ITC trade in the example above. Note that the commissions are ~$0.1 (at the time of writing this post, 1 USD = ~75 INR). But, if this option is not checked, the trade will have commissions listed like below:
Note the currency and the value of the commissions. What has happened here is that the system has taken the value exactly as it is and assumed it is in the USD currency.
Default chart settings
When you add charts to trades and by using the group apply option, a daily candlestick chart with no indicators is added. But if you want to make sure that a specific type of chart with custom selected indicators, chart types, and timeframe is added when you use those options, you can set it here. Note that you can have several chart settings (up to 10) and one of them as the "default" chart settings which will be used for group apply and the "add chart" chart generation methods.
In addition to the 2 chart generation methods mentioned above, TradesViz also automatically generates charts when you import from your trade export files (CSV). For this type of chart generation, you can have several "active" chart settings and all of the "active" active chart settings will be used for generating a single chart for each chart setting when importing. For example, you can have 1 intraday chart with VWAP indicator and 1 daily chart with SMA-100 and EMA-50 plotted on it - all your imported trades will automatically have these charts generated. For more info about this, please refer to the dedicated blog post here.
Currency display
Another currency-related setting - but does do anything related to "converting" the actual currency. In the section above, we explained and how examples of trades in the different base currency where the PnL was the only field in the base currency, but the execution was in the native currency of the trade. But if you want to show everything in the base currency of your account, you can do so by checking this option. Below is an example where this option is checked and the trade was imported with the commission conversion option checked. All the fields are now in USD (the base currency).
Symbol display
Option trade's symbol names can be very long because of inclusion of underlying, strike, expiry, etc., to clean this up and to simplify the trades table view, we have added this option - meaning, the symbol in the display symbol of trades will now have only the underlying symbol. For example, if you have an options trade in NFLX, say "NFLX 6th Mar 2020 390 CALL" - it will be displayed as just "NFLX" in the trades table view.
This effect is not only limited to just appearance in the table views. In the symbol charts tab under the Trades analysis charts, when grouping by statistics by symbol, instead of using a symbol's full name - just the underlying will be used. This is a preference that depends on the type of trader you are. If you primarily focused on the stock with a little bit of options trading, it makes sense to check this option because you would focus on the underlying alone. But if you are mainly an options trader - expiry, strikes are important information. So, it's it would be better to have this information on display at all times.
Trading days
This is one of the global filter settings that affect charts in most of the tabs.
Depending on what type of "days" you want, you can choose to check the "trading days" option or not. A trading day here is defined as a day on which at least a single execution was made - opening a position, adjusting a position or closing a position. If this option is checked, only trading days are counted, else all calendar days are counted.
For example, if out of the last 90 calendar days (including weekends), if you traded only 15 trading days, choosing "Last 15 days" with the "use trading days" option checked and then choosing "Last 90 days" with the "use trading days" checked will give you the same result. This is once again to accommodate different trader's preferences - simply use what suits you the most!
Trading Accounts
As we have seen in many of the other blog posts, every trade in TradesViz belongs to a "Trading account" - think of this as something like a trading portfolio and your TradesViz account as a collection of portfolios. We created this system so that traders can easily manage their trades without having to apply tags to trades and keep track of them. You can access your trading account settings and list of trading accounts here.
A single TradesViz user can have up to 10 trading accounts. The other advantage of having several trading accounts is commission management. For each trading account, you can set a commission for each asset class we support individually.
Also, in the export management (explained here) page, you can export trades from each trading account individually or combine 1 or more accounts and export from them. It really adds a lot of flexibility and makes managing a large number of trades very easy for an individual trader. Note that using this and checking the "Use Account Specific Commissions and Fees?" option in the import page overrides the commissions/fees data available in the file you import. So use this feature only if the fees and commissions data is not available as part of your import file or if you want your trades/executions to have custom commissions and fees.
In this section of the Account settings, you can:
- Add new trading accounts
- Edit the account details (commissions, fees (new), targets (new), name, description)
- Delete trading accounts - Important Note: Deleting your trading account deletes all trade and files associated with that trading account. This operation is not reversible!
2021-Apr-24 Update:
- You can now add default fees to each execution just like default commissions
- You can now add profit target and stop-loss based on a percentage or point basis to each trade (need non-zero value to be valid)
These are the important settings that affect TradesViz features and how you interact with TradesViz. If you feel there are features missing or if you have any issues with these settings, please contact us at [email protected] for assistance.
