tastytrade: Invest & Trade

This a great app, however the constant session expiration and forced re-authentication is crazy. Despite requesting a session timeout of more than 4 hours multiple times, the developer has never seemed interested in making the change. Even with the 4 hours max setting there are often times where you are prompted for credentials before that time has expired. TOS gives you a full 24 hours and works. The brokerage is another reason I only gave it 3 starts. When Tom and Scott departed, users lost a customer facing part of the business that cannot and has not been replaced. They were human, they were touchable and they were always available to help. Example, Tasty consistently has higher buying power requirements vs other brokers for products that we all trade every day. When Scott was around, I could reach out to him and explain the difference. He would work with the risk team and Apex and get it resolved. Since Scott has departed, I’ve attempted the same. Now, I get a response that says there is nothing that can be done and blame is shifted to Apex. Something can be done, you just don’t want to or don’t know how to fix the issue.

I’ll start with the good. Idea is great as a pure options platform. The UI has gotten better and I respect the team for that. Fees can’t be beat. However, there are some glitches and lack of features that prevent this app from being mediocre. No trailing stops. Mainly because one of the founders isn’t interested in them. I believe he thinks they’re unprofitable. If that’s the case then buying options shouldn’t be a feature because options sellers win a majority of the time. You have to settle for OCO bracket orders. But those max out at 100% so you can’t set it to 105%, 200% or anything. For a pure options platform, there is no ability to set alerts for options. A current bug is when you save your settings for Order Activity, it reverts back when you reopen the app. This should in theory be an easy fix. Worst of all, say you try to sell an option so you update your stop near where the price is. Tastytrade will save it as a working order. Say you want to update the working order even tighter. In the event you submit your working order while price drops below where your stop is, it will cancel the order without filling you. You won’t get a notification. So then you see your trade P/L jumping around but you’re thinking you’re out of the trade. This is when you have to close the app, open it again, then manually set another order to be filled. Mistakes like this should not happen. No trailing stop can cost you money but the combination of glitches/lack of features can cost you even more.

I’m so glad to see that the charts have been improved with the most recent update! I love the option tables and the order entry mechanics on the iPad app - this is actually the platform I default to when I’m placing an order. I LOVE being able to view the IVx structure of the underlying I’m trading - this is fantastic for calendars and diagonals. I also really love all the innovative metrics Tasty displays; POP, P50, beta-weighted delta. The community and research are, of course, top-notch. IMO, one thing this version is missing is a fully developed graphing feature. The curve view on iPhone does display profitability zones, which is cool, but an actual p/l curve would be even better. I don’t see any graphing feature on iPad. It’s possible that it exists and that I haven’t found it yet. It would also be nice if in the positions tab you could group option positions together like you can on the web version; it’s not easy to determine the overall p/l of my multi-leg strategies on the iPad app.