Upload your first CSV

Until you upload something, every page runs on a sample book — eleven legs across two accounts, holding a covered call, a cash-secured put, a bull put spread, a diagonal, a collar and some stock. It exists so the dashboard has something to show. Replacing it takes one file.

What to export

On the Portfolio tab, open the book panel and choose your file. Three shapes are understood, all of them a positions export — what you hold right now, not a history of trades:

A holdings CSV — the positions export most brokers offer from the account summary screen.
A portfolio CSV — the same thing under a different name.
A positions report — the structured export some brokers produce for third-party tools.

Exports that are transactions rather than positions will not load: a list of fills says what you did, not what you are left holding, and reconstructing one from the other needs the whole history rather than a recent slice.

What happens to the file

It becomes a book, not a stored document The file is parsed into positions and the positions are what is kept. Each leg becomes a symbol, a quantity, a right, a strike, an expiry, a cost basis and an account. The book is attached to your account, so it follows you to another browser when you sign in.

From then on the upload is irrelevant: you can edit legs by hand, add ones that were missing, change a cost basis, or set the cash balances per account. Uploading again replaces the book; Reset puts the sample back.

Cost basis matters more than it looks

Each leg takes a price per share — for options as well as stock, so a contract bought for $2.40 is entered as 2.40, not 240. Leaving it blank opens the position at today's price, which is the right choice when you want to study a structure rather than your actual entry.

The wheel rule depends on it Anything that decides where to write a call against stock uses your basis as a floor — the rule being never to sell the underlying below what you paid for it. If a lot arrived from an assignment, brokers often report the basis already reduced by the premium you collected, which understates what you actually paid and lets the floor drift too low. Where you know the true number, set it by hand.

Fixing what came in wrong

Symptom	Usually means	Fix
A leg shows no price	The contract has no usable quote — far strike, thin expiry	Nothing: it is marked at intrinsic and labelled. Expected on illiquid strikes.
Two legs that belong together read separately	They expire on different dates, so they are a diagonal	Nothing — that is correct. See the Portfolio page on pairing.
Break-even looks wrong on a stock position	Cost basis blank, so it opened at today's price	Edit the leg and enter what you paid, per share.
Buying power looks far too large	Cash was not found in the export	Set the cash balance for that account by hand.

If you would rather not upload anything

You do not have to. Add positions by hand — symbol, quantity, strike, expiry — and you have a book to study without any broker file being involved. For learning how a structure behaves, a hand-built two-leg book is often clearer than your real one, because nothing else in it is moving at the same time.