A spread is a single trade made up of more than one option leg, opened at the same moment so the legs work together. Instead of buying a single call or a single put, a spread might buy one strike and sell another, or buy a call and a put. The portal recognizes spreads and displays them as one trade with each leg visible underneath.

Spread-type pills

Every spread trade gets a colored pill that names the structure at a glance. You'll see the same pill on the Trades page, the Copy Trade page, the Trade History, and on Marketplace listings. The most common ones:

• CC — Call Credit Spread. Sell a call, buy a higher-strike call. Profits when the underlying stays below the short strike.
• CD — Call Debit Spread. Buy a call, sell a higher-strike call. Profits when the underlying climbs.
• PC — Put Credit Spread. Sell a put, buy a lower-strike put. Profits when the underlying stays above the short strike.
• PD — Put Debit Spread. Buy a put, sell a lower-strike put. Profits when the underlying falls.
• IC — Iron Condor. A call credit spread and a put credit spread on the same name. Profits when the underlying stays in a range between the two short strikes.
• IB — Iron Butterfly. Like an iron condor but with the two short strikes at the same price. Tighter range, larger potential payout.

If you click or tap the pill, the trade row expands and you'll see the individual legs that make up the spread.

How a spread is named

Because a spread has several legs, there's no single contract symbol to put in the ticker column. So a spread row names the underlying, the expiration, and the structure instead:

Example

An iron condor on XSP expiring August 15th reads XSP on the top line with 8/15 Iron Condor underneath — not a contract symbol, because no single one of the four legs describes the trade.

You'll see this same naming everywhere a spread appears: live trade cards on the Trades page, the Recent Trades table on your Dashboard, Trade History, the Edit-fills window, and the confirmation windows when you close or share a trade.

A spread also shows no Call or Put marker. Single-leg trades get a CALL or PUT tag, but an iron butterfly is neither — it holds calls and puts at once. The spread-type pill tells you the structure instead.

Example

An iron butterfly on XSP reads XSP 8/15 Iron Butterfly with an IB pill. It does not read "XSP 8/15 640P", even though one of its four legs happens to be the 640 put.

The per-leg breakdown

Spreads carry more information than single-leg trades, so the portal hides the leg detail by default and shows the summary — the spread's name, the net price you paid or received, and the spread's overall profit-and-loss. Expand the trade to reveal:

• Each leg's action (buy or sell).
• Each leg's strike and expiry.
• The fill price for that leg on the way in.
• The fill price on the way out, once the trade closes.

Example

You're in an iron condor on SPY. The summary row shows SPY IC, net credit $1.20, +12%. Expanding the row reveals four legs: Sell 450 Call $0.85, Buy 455 Call $0.35, Sell 440 Put $0.95, Buy 435 Put $0.25 — the four prices that combined to make the $1.20 credit.

Once a multi-leg trade has closed, each leg also shows a green ✓ or red ✗ — and a matching row color — based on whether that individual leg made or lost money. At a glance you can see which legs carried the trade and which dragged on it, even when the overall result was a win.

Reading profit and loss on a credit spread

Credit spreads — CC, PC, IC, and IB — work the opposite way from buying a single option. You collect money up front (the credit), and your goal is for the spread to get cheaper so you can buy it back for less than you sold it, or let it expire worthless. That means:

• You are profitable when the spread's price is below the credit you took in, not above it.
• Your best case is the low the spread reached (the cheapest it got to buy back), and your worst case is the high.

The portal reads all of this from the seller's side, so a green, positive number is real profit and a red, negative one is a real loss — no mental math required.

Example

You sell an iron condor for a $0.50 credit ($50 per contract). Later it's trading at $0.30. You're up $20, about +40% — because you could buy it back for $30 and keep the $20 difference. If instead it climbed to $0.70, you'd be down $20. On the card, the High watermark is your worst moment and the Low is your best.

Note

This is why a credit spread that entered at $0.19 and was bought back at $0.04 shows as a win — you kept almost the entire credit. If a spread's numbers ever look upside-down to you, see My P&L Looks Wrong.

Take-profit and stop-loss on a credit spread

Because a credit spread profits as its price falls, its targets sit on the opposite sides from a bought option (see Profit Target & Stop-Loss and Modifying Stop-Loss & Take-Profit):

• Your take-profit is a price below where the spread is now — you're waiting for it to get cheaper to buy back. Setting a take-profit below the current price is normal and will not close the trade instantly.
• Your stop-loss is a price above where the spread is now — it caps your loss if the spread gets more expensive.

Example

You took in $0.50 and the spread is now $0.30. You might set a take-profit at $0.20 (buy it back for a bigger win) and a stop-loss at $0.40 (cap the damage if it turns against you). Neither one triggers right away — the take-profit waits for the price to fall to $0.20, the stop-loss waits for it to rise to $0.40.

Hold-Through: a copied spread with a target and no stop-loss

Some shot callers trade credit spreads by holding them all the way to expiration. They don't use a stop-loss at all — they sell the spread, wait for it to decay to nothing, and keep the premium. When you copy a strategy like that, your trade is set up the same way: a profit target and no stop-loss. That is called Hold-Through, and you'll know a trade is running it two ways:

• A HOLD badge sits next to the spread's other badges on the card.
• Where the stop price normally sits, the card says No stop in amber instead of showing a dollar figure.

The blank is deliberate, and the card says so rather than leaving an empty price that could be mistaken for something still loading.

Why go without a stop? Because on a credit spread a stop-loss measures the wrong thing. A spread you sold for $0.61 can easily trade up to $5.00 in the middle of its life and still expire worthless — a full win. Measured as a percentage move against you, $0.61 to $5.00 is a 719% loss, and the loosest stop the system allows is 99%. Any stop at all would have closed you out near your worst price, weeks before the trade actually worked.

What protects you instead is the spread itself. A credit spread is defined risk: the long leg caps your loss no matter how far the underlying moves. You know your worst case the moment you open it.

Example

You copy a bull put credit spread and take in $0.61 ($61 per contract) on a $5-wide spread. Your target is set to buy it back at $0.01 — essentially "let it expire worthless." Three weeks in it's trading at $4.80 and your card is deep red. With Hold-Through there is no stop to trip, so the trade stays open; by expiration the spread decays to zero and you keep the full $61. The most you could ever have lost was the spread's $5 width minus your $61 credit, or $439 per contract — known from the first minute.

Warning

Hold-Through turns off automatic re-protection only. Your Killswitch, Close Swings at End of Day, Flatten All, and closing the trade by hand all still reach these positions normally. You are never stuck in one.

Note

Both sides have to agree before a stop is left off. The shot caller has to publish the strategy as Hold-Through, and you have to turn it on yourself — the switch is on the Copy Trade tab of your strategy's settings. If either one says no, your copies get an ordinary stop-loss.

Closing one side of a spread

For iron condors and iron butterflies (anything with both call and put brackets), the close button on a spread expands into three choices instead of one:

• Close whole spread — exits every leg at once.
• Close call side — exits only the call legs; the put bracket stays alive.
• Close put side — exits only the put legs; the call bracket stays alive.

This is useful when one side of an iron condor is clearly safe and the other side is the one running against you. You can lock in the safe side and let the worry-side play out — or vice versa.

Where spreads show up

Spreads behave the same way everywhere they appear:

• On the Live Trades page they get a card with an expandable leg list and the spread-aware action buttons.
• On the Copy Trade page they show up in the alerts table with the spread pill next to the ticker.
• In Trade History completed spreads keep their pill so you can spot the structures at a glance.
• In any alerts table that lists a spread, hovering the ticker or the type pill pops up the leg set without leaving the page — each leg's buy/sell side, its strike, and what it filled at. An iron condor's legs come grouped into the two verticals they really are, so you can read the put side and the call side separately.
• In the Marketplace detail pages, a strategy that publishes spreads will show pills on every historical and open trade so you can see what the strategy actually trades.

Tip

If a spread is staring back at you and the pill looks unfamiliar, click it. The leg breakdown almost always makes the structure click — "ah, this is just a call sold against a long call."