Split & Merge Trades
In Tradervue, an “execution” is just an individual buy or sell. A “trade” is a group of executions. Only trades will have P&L associated.
When you import your trades into Tradervue, they come in as a list of individual executions. Even something simple like buying 1000 shares might come in as buy 200, buy 400, and another buy 400. They might not even occur all at the same time – if you entered that order as a limit buy, there could be an arbitrary amount of time between the first and last execution. They also might execute on different venues.
But when you entered the order on your platform, you were thinking “buy 1000 shares”. All the rest is important, but in a higher level sense it’s all just details.
When you import all of these trade executions into Tradervue, it uses an algorithm to group your trade executions together into logical trades. In it’s simplest form, this algorithm basically starts a new trade if
A) you change sides (e.g. long to short),
or
B) it’s been over a certain time limit since your last trade closed.
Otherwise it may continue the prior trade.
What we’ve found is the vast majority of the time, Tradervue’s automatic trade grouping does what the trader would want, and the resultant logical trades match up with a “trade” in the trader’s mind. Occasionally, however, you might want to tweak this trade grouping.
So with that in mind, we have two functions in Tradervue that will make your trading journaling experience more easy:
Split Trade:
If you click “Advanced”, and then “Split Trade” on the trade detail screen, you’ll see the trade split interface. On this screen you can choose the specific execution that should start the new trade, then click “Split Trade”. Not all of your executions can be selected – only those that would ensure the original trade is closed after the split.
Merge trades
If you click “Advanced” and then “Merge Trades” on the trade detail screen, you’ll see the trade merge screen. Here you can choose which trade you would like to merge with the current trade; only trades which are eligible to merge are shown. If you select the trade you wish to merge, and click “Merge Trades”, the selected trade will be merged with the current trade.
For both split and merge, you will only see those options if they are applicable. For example, if a trade cannot be split, you will not see the Split Trade option. And if there are no eligible trades to merge with the current trade, you won’t see the Merge Trades option.
So all in all, you probably won’t need to use these features often, if at all. But if you want to be very specific in what you refer to as a “trade”, you can now fine-tune things as much as you like.
Some of our traders prefer to create a new “trade” whenever they get flat, you can change a setting to make this happen for all future imports - to do that, you can follow these steps:
- Login to your Tradervue account
- Click on your username located on the top right corner
- Go to the “Trade Settings” tab
- Select the Trade Import auto-merge settings that you wish to use
- Click on the “Update” button below
- Settings will be used on your next import.
Note: The adjust auto-merge and auto-split settings are available only on the Silver and Gold packages.
For your existing trades, you can either a) use the “Split” function, which is explained above or b) delete the trades and re-import. You can delete multiple trades at once with the bulk editor ( http://blog.tradervue.com/2012/05/24/bulk-editing-trades/).
If you have questions, or are having trouble importing data in the generic format, please reach out to support@tradervue.com or click on the "Contact Us" link below.