IB-Tracker: Stocks, Futures and Options positions tracker (includes Interactive Brokers IBKR TWS API integration)
Let IB-Tracker free you from the constraints of spreadsheets.
IB-Tracker a free application that allows you to track your Stocks, Futures and Options positions. A fantastic alternative to using spreadsheets like Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets!
Stocks, Futures and Options positions tracker (includes Interactive Brokers IBKR TWS API integration)
You do not need an Interactive Brokers account but if you have one then IB-Tracker can connect to your running IB Trader Workstation (TWS) instance in order to display real time price action for all of your positions. You can manually record and edit trades and transactions and be able to view all current active positions and all closed positions. Each trade shows all transaction history giving you an instant look at your overall financial picture.
If you are not using TWS integration, IB-Tracker allows you to "scrape" stock and futures prices from Yahoo Finance (albeit, the prices will be at least 15 minutes delayed). You just need to attempt to connect to TWS and when that fails, you will get a popup asking if you would like to retrieve the scraped market prices.
This program exists because tracking trades and their corresponding transactions in IBKR versus TastyTrade, Think or Swim, etc is not easy. In many parts of the world outside of the USA, it seems that IBKR is the only affordable and viable alternative for options trading. IB-Trader aims to make the trade tracking process as enjoyable and painless as possible.
- Can easily be used with or without an IBKR account allowing IB-Tracker to be a great alternative to tracking your positions using spreadsheets.
- Equity and Futures Options focused (underlying stocks and futures can also be tracked).
- Allow Interactive Broker users to have a better experience tracking their active trades and trade histories.
- Allow trades to be grouped and tracked by Category/Strategy.
- Easy to learn and very intuitive with all information available on the main screen.
- Portable. You can easily run the program from a thumb drive. No intrusive install or uninstall procedures.
- High DPI aware. Works and looks great on monitors of all sizes, resolutions and font scalings.
- Small (about 580K), fast (written in C++), and self-contained (no external dependencies).
- Simple text file "database" that can easily be manually edited if needed. No additional database engine required.
- The only pain point is that you have to manually enter your transactions into IB-Tracker in order to ensure that transactions are grouped with the correct trades. However, there is a "Reconcile" functionality that ensures that your local data always matches what exists in IBKR/TWS.
- Currently, only Windows compatible (Windows 10 and Windows 11). May work on older Windows versions but not guaranteed. It will work on Linux using Wine but you may experience some visual glitches due to the font family Unicode characters that the program uses.
The latest package can be downloaded from the RELEASES page. If you wish to compile the source code yourself, it was created using Microsoft Visual Studio Community 2022 and you will find the necessary solution and project files bundled in the source code. It compiles using the C++20 standard.
All release packages come with a compiled EXE. That is all the application requires. Yes, just one file. The compiled EXE can be found inside the IB-Tracker.zip download from the RELEASES page.
- Create a folder on your computer that you will use for IB-Tracker. Ensure that the folder can be read and written to (eg. C:\IB-Tracker).
- Unpack/Unzip the downloaded archive (IB-Tracker.zip) into your IB-Tracker folder.
- Double Click on the IB-Tracker.exe application to start it. That's it. Simple.
- To uninstall, just delete the files and folder.
IB-Tracker will create three additional files as needed when it executes:
- IB-Tracker-config.txt
- IB-Tracker-journalnotes.txt
- IB-Tracker-database.db
NOTE: If you get a popup warning message box from the operating system saying that "a DLL is not found and reinstalling the program may fix this problem", then it means that you are missing the Visual C++ redistributable package that is normally available on most Windows 10 and Windows 11 machines. Download and install it from this Microsoft page: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-US/cpp/windows/latest-supported-vc-redist?view=msvc-170 Here is the direct link to the file: https://aka.ms/vs/17/release/vc_redist.x86.exe
Start IB Trader Workstation (TWS) and then click "Connect to TWS" from within IB-Tracker.
IB-Tracker can run without connecting to TWS but obviously you will not get streaming price data or be able to "reconcile" your trade data to what is in your IBKR account.
The configuration file (IB-Tracker-config.txt) is an extremely simple text file. Each line is composed of two items (key and values) separated by one or more pipe ("|") characters.
By default, IB-Tracker will connect to the regular TWS trading port (7496). You can manually edit the configuration file to change the ENABLEPAPERTRADING configuration option to true in order connect to the TWS paper trading port (7497).
NOTE: Until the documentation is completed, you will find functionality available via right-click popup menus. Simply try right clicking on the trade's ticker line or any one (or more) selected legs of a trade. Doing so should popup a menu with related actions (such as rolling legs, expiring or closing legs, taking assignments, adding to existing position, etc).
When you enter or modify a Trade, you can specify that the Trade belongs to a Category. A Category is simply a logical grouping that you have designated for the Trade. For example, you may wish to group all 90 DTE Strangles together. When the list of Active Trades are shown, they will be displayed in order using your list of Categories.
When entering the ticker symbol, ensure that any Futures symbol is preceded by a forward slash. For example, Futures oil would be /CL. This is necessary within IB-Tracker even though IBKR itself does not use a forward slash preceding Futures ticker symbols. For Futures, you will also have to enter the ending date for the contract. This ensures that IB-Tracker can correctly query TWS in order to get real time price data.
Click (while holding down the CTRL key) on each Leg you wish to Roll, Close or Expire. With the Legs selected, right click on one of those legs to display a popup menu. Select the Roll, Close or Expire action from that menu.
If IB-Tracker is executed multiple times then the previous instance of the program will be found and that instance will be displayed. This prevents multiple copies of the application from running at one time thereby overwriting the database data by each application instances. The exception to this rule is if IB-Tracker.exe is executed from different folders/subdirectories. In this case, individual instances of IB-Tracker will run because their databases will exist in different folders thereby avoiding the overwrite issue.
If you are connected to TWS, performing a Reconcile will fetch your position data from the IBKR servers and then compare them to your locally stored data. Any discrepancies between the data will be displayed allowing you to find and correct any anomalies. This is a very useful feature to ensure that trades and transactions that you have created with IB-Tracker match trades that you have executed through TWS.
Feel free to contribute something that would be convenient and useful to include in the application. You are welcome to open a pull request and contribute.
This project is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the MIT license. See LICENSE for details.