To start a super account, click the [New] button in the Account Info screen. Enter an appropriate name for the account and click the “Make this a Super account” checkbox. Then click [OK]. You will see that the Account Info screen now contains a list of all available regular accounts. Checkmark each of the regular accounts you would like to include in this super account.

Now, whenever you make the super account the active current account, the Account Status window and all Reports will reflect the combined transactions and positions of the constituent accounts.

Note that since a super account does not have its own T.Log, whenever you make a super account the active current account, the T.Log button in the main button bar will be grayed out. Two other buttons also grayed out will be the Convert Trades and Expire Options buttons in the Matrix. Also note that a super account does not have its own commission schedule, securities margin parameters, and earnings and charge rates. However, a super account does have its own open positions evaluation preferences, report formats, and Instant Reports setting.

2. It is now possible to deposit shares of stock or units of a physical commodity into an account. This is appropriate when stock or physicals were not acquired by purchase (at least not within the time frame of the current account), and when it would not be appropriate to enter a “buy” transaction. An example would be when shares of a particular stock were gifted to you, and you have decided to deposit the shares into the current account. To enter this transaction, you could either type it manually into the T.Log or you could open that stock’s Matrix, enter an opening trade of the correct quantity in the Trade field, and do a Convert Trades operation. After that, open the T.Log and “fix up” the trade as follows: Change the transaction type from Buy to Deposit, change the transaction date to the acquisition date for tax purposes, change the price to the effective basis price for tax purposes, and otherwise make everything right about the transaction.

An example when it would be appropriate to deposit units of a physical commodity would be when a farmer wants to reflect the estimated size of his crop for a particular year. This would be the first step in preparing to model potential futures or options hedges against that crop.

If a deposit of shares of stock or units of a physical commodity can is the first transaction in a T.Log then the net value of that deposit is considered to be that account’s initial value.

Finally, it is also possible to withdraw shares of stock or units of a physical commodity. This kind of transaction lowers the account’s value without posting any offsetting cash proceeds.

One other new type of transaction that is allowed in the T.Log is a non-taxable distribution (NTD). A company (or more commonly, a mutual fund) can sometimes make distributions to shareholders that are not attributable to earnings. These non-taxable distributions, also known as return of capital, represent a return of your investment principal.

When there has been an NTD, it is not taxable because it is simply a return of part of your investment. The software automatically lowers your cost basis in the stock and makes a proportionate adjustment to the original transaction price. Non-taxable distributions cannot reduce your basis below zero. If you receive returns of capital that, taken together, exceed your original basis, the excess must be reported as a long-term capital gain.

Note: Nontaxable distributions are not the same as the tax-exempt dividends. While tax-exempt dividends are not taxable, they do not affect the basis.

3. Three of the program’s maximum capacities (per asset) have been increased.

• Max number of strikes From 50 to 100
• Max number of expiration months From 12 to 44
• Max number of futures contracts From 14 to 44

4. In the Matrix Summary Section, the existing position’s gain/loss now includes estimated slippage and commission for closing the position, depending on the “Valuation to Include” settings for the current account. This should make the Matrix’s gain/loss number always agree with the Account Status from now on. Until now, the Matrix’s number was always computed without slippage and commission. The “Valuation to Include” setting is accessible in both the Account Information and the Account Status screens.

Also, the Matrix Summary Section now accounts for header selection in the Matrix. Header selection is when the user clicks one or more of the month headers, causing them to change color and making the software include just the positions you may have in that month (or in those months). Until now, header selection was used only to determine the position that would be graphically analyzed when the Analyze button was clicked. Now, header selection affects the Summary Section as well.

5. The limit on the maximum possible IV that could be measured by the program was increased from 300% to 500%.

6. For our Australian friends who use DataVue ASX EOD to update their quotes display, we put in extra code to prevent showing a duplicate red bar in the Price Charts.

7. A feature was added to help the user who has forgotten to expire options. Until now, if the user does not tell OptionVue to expire options on or before the expiration date, he would eventually have to manually enter the appropriate expiration or exercise transactions into the T.Log. (Or, BackTrader users could step back to the expiration date and do an Expire Options operation.) Now, however, the program automatically checks whether there are any options positions in any of your accounts that are beyond expiration. If there are, a notice pops up informing you of that fact and asking if you want to let the program try to take care of them for you. If you go ahead, the program will show which ones it was able to take care of and which ones it could not. (The main challenge is locating a price for the underlying – either in the Quotes Display, the asset file, or the price history file – with a date/time stamp that is reasonably close (if not precisely on) the closing price on the option’s last day of trading.)

8. A new button in the upper left corner of the Quotes Display allows you to print the entire contents of the Quotes Display – either to the printer or to a comma delimited text file. Until now, all you could do is print a snapshot of what was currently being displayed on the screen. You can still do that by clicking the snapshot print button in the upper right area of the main window, but now you can also print the entire contents of the Quotes Display, including off-screen items, by clicking the new button.

9. With a futures-based asset, the software normally selects an appropriate independent variable from among the futures contracts when doing a Graphic Analysis. However, if you have a physical commodity defined and you would like that physical to be the independent variable in a Graphic Analysis, you may do so by first clicking on the physical’s header (in the Matrix) to highlight it.

10. We originally programmed the interface with Thomson One to request each option five times (once for each of the exchanges) and compute the best bid/offer (BBO) in the software. However, Thomson One recently began providing BBO prices. So with this release we began using that feature, which allows us to request each option just once and the software does not have to compute BBO.