That's the philosophy behind ThetaVault 2.0. It's a professional-grade options trading journal I built from scratch in Rust, purpose-built for traders who follow the tastytrade methodology: sell premium, manage at 21 DTE, take 50% profits, keep undefined-risk under control.

Most traders track their trades in a broker dashboard or a spreadsheet. That's fine when you have 5 positions. When you're running 15–25 concurrent options positions across 8 tickers, managing rolls, tracking Greeks portfolio-wide, and trying to understand whether your entry criteria are actually working — you need something better.

The Problem With Existing Tools

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Every options trader eventually hits the same wall.

Your broker dashboard shows you open P&L and Greeks, but nothing historical. It doesn't tell you what your average ROC on iron condors was last quarter, whether you're actually better when IV rank is above 50%, or how your win rate changes when you close at 21 DTE vs holding longer.

Spreadsheets help — but they require manual data entry, they break when you add multi-leg strategies, and the math is on you to get right. One wrong formula and your ROC calculations are silent garbage for months.

Web-based journals exist (OptionAlpha, Tradersync, etc.) but they're subscription-based, slow, and don't give you the raw data access serious analysis requires.

What I wanted was:

• Instant startup — no loading screens, no browser
• Single binary — works on any machine, no installation drama
• 100% correct math — typed language guarantees, not just hope
• tastytrade KPI alignment — the metrics that actually matter for premium selling

So I built it in Rust.

Why Rust for a Trading Journal?

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Rust is an unusual choice for a terminal app. Most people reach for Python or Go. Here's why Rust made sense:

The key advantage is type safety. When you define that a strike is f64 and a quantity is i32 and the compiler enforces every calculation that uses them, formula bugs don't survive past build time. The Black-Scholes implementation, the Reg-T BPR calculations, the Kelly Criterion — they're either right at compile time, or they don't compile.

The single binary matters more than it sounds. Clone the repo, cargo build --release, and you have a 30 MB binary that runs on any macOS or Linux machine with zero dependencies. No Node.js. No Docker. No npm install nightmares.

16 Strategies, All the Math

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ThetaVault supports every major tastytrade strategy — and gets the math right for each one.

Each strategy has a canonical leg template — the app knows which legs are "short" vs "long" and applies the correct BPR, max profit, max loss, and breakeven formulas automatically.

The PBWB (Put Broken Wing Butterfly) is the most complex. It requires three long put legs at different strikes plus the short leg, and the max profit/loss formula differs from a standard condor. Getting that wrong means your risk display is lying to you. ThetaVault's PBWB implementation uses the correct offset formula and validates strike ladders — if the strikes are wrong, it flags the position in the journal rather than showing a false max profit number.

The Journal View

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The heart of ThetaVault is the trade journal — a 22-column table that gives you complete situational awareness on every open and closed position.

Every column is toggleable via a column picker (press v). You only show what you need.

The Mgmt column is something I haven't seen in other journals. It computes the date by which you should be looking to manage or close the trade to stay on the 21 DTE schedule. It turns RED when that date has passed, YELLOW when you're within 5 days.

Chain View

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Press G to toggle Chain View — a hierarchical grouping of all trades by ticker, showing roll chains together:

▼ SPY    3 open · 5 closed    net P&L: +$2,847
  ├─ [IC]  Feb 15  Rolls: 2  Credit: $4.85  Net P&L: +1,203  CLSD ✓
  ├─ [IC]  Mar 01  Rolls: 1  Credit: $3.20  Net P&L: +847    CLSD ✓
  └─ [STR] Mar 08  Rolls: 0  Credit: $6.40  Net P&L: —       OPEN ●

This is invaluable for understanding your total exposure in a campaign. If you've rolled a strangle three times, you want to see the cumulative P&L and commissions across the entire chain, not just the current leg.

Dashboard: Portfolio-Wide Intelligence

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The dashboard gives you a real-time overview of everything open.

Heat Card — the most important number in your account. It shows total BPR as a percentage of account size, with adaptive thresholds: when VIX is elevated, the "safe zone" threshold tightens automatically. Includes a Kelly fraction footer showing your optimal position size.

Greeks Card — portfolio-wide net theta, beta-weighted delta, and net vega. These numbers aggregate across all open positions and tell you: how much time decay are you collecting per day? How directionally biased is the book? How exposed are you to volatility changes?

POP Health — average probability of profit across all open positions. If any position is trading within 3% of its breakeven, it's flagged in red. This is your "stress radar."

Monthly Pace — if you've set a monthly P&L target in admin settings, this card shows your current month's P&L and whether you're on track.

Strategy Distribution — a visual bar showing the BPR breakdown by strategy type. At a glance: are you over-allocated to strangles? Underweighted in iron condors?

The Calculations Are Actually Correct

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I ran the entire calculation stack through a rigorous audit against tastytrade mechanics and academic finance formulas. The verdict: A+ accuracy.

Black-Scholes Greeks

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The Greek estimation uses the standard Black-Scholes model with the Abramowitz & Stegun approximation for the normal CDF:

The sign convention on theta is tastytrade-aligned: positive theta means you're the premium seller collecting time decay. This is the opposite of academic convention, but it's how tastytrade displays Greeks — and it's the convention that makes intuitive sense for a credit-seller's journal.

Buying Power Reduction

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BPR is computed using Reg-T margin rules per strategy type:

Probability of Profit

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Kelly Criterion

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Capped at 25% to prevent ruin. Negative Kelly (negative edge) is shown in red — "reduce size."

Performance Analytics: 14 Sections

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The Performance tab gives you a full post-trade analysis engine. 14 collapsible sections, toggled individually with keys 1–0.

The IVR and VIX sections are what tell you whether your entry timing is actually working. If your win rate in the 25-50% IVR bucket is 71% but drops to 52% in the <25% bucket — that's the data you need to tighten your entry rules.

Playbook Compliance System

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This is the feature that separates ThetaVault from every spreadsheet approach.

You define a trading playbook — a set of entry criteria for a specific strategy:

• Min/Max IV Rank range (e.g., "only enter when IVR > 40")
• Min Probability of Profit (e.g., "POP must be ≥ 68%")
• Max Delta at entry (e.g., "delta ≤ 0.16")
• DTE range (e.g., "30–45 DTE only")
• Max BPR % of account
• Target profit %, stop loss %, management DTE

When you log a trade, ThetaVault automatically matches it to the best-fitting playbook. If exactly one playbook matches, it auto-assigns. If the trade violates any criterion, a [!] flag appears in the journal next to the ticker.

Getting Started

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ThetaVault requires Rust (the toolchain, not just the language). Install it once, then you're set for all future builds.

1. Install Rust:

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh

2. Clone and build:

git clone https://github.com/leviceroy/ThetaVault.git
cd ThetaVault
cargo build --release

3. Run:

./target/release/theta-vault-rust

That's it. The SQLite database (trades.db) is created automatically on first run. No setup wizard, no config files, no cloud account.

First steps inside the app:

1. Press Tab to navigate to Admin (Tab 5) and set your account size
2. Press Tab to Playbook (Tab 3) and create your first strategy playbook
3. Press Tab to Journal (Tab 2) and press n to log your first trade
4. Press Tab to Dashboard (Tab 1) to see your portfolio Greeks and heat

Conclusion

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ThetaVault 2.0 is what a serious options journal should be. Not a subscription SaaS, not a fragile spreadsheet — a fast, reliable, open-source tool that knows the tastytrade playbook as well as you do.

The math is right. The strategy coverage is complete. The analytics go deep enough to actually improve your trading.

If you're a tastytrade-style premium seller who wants real data on whether your process is working, give it a shot. Star the repo if it's useful — it's how I know this work matters.

https://github.com/leviceroy/ThetaVault

Built with Rust, ratatui, and SQLite. Copyright © 2025 Chris Wenk.